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Spotted Dick
3/4 lb. (3 cups) flour 1/2 teaspoonful salt 5 tablespoonfuls chopped suet 3 tablespoonfuls sugar 1/2 teaspoonful grated 1/4 lb. (1 cup) currants 2 teaspoonfuls baking nutmeg 1 egg powder Milk Sieve the flour, salt, baking powder and sugar into a basin, add the suet, currants, nutmeg and the egg well beaten. Make into a stiff dough with some milk. Put into a greased mold, cover with a greased paper and steam steadily for two hours.
Turn out, decorate with a star of whipped and sweetened cream, and serve hot with a sweet sauce.
In homely circles, a boiled suet pudding with
The ingredient list has been scrambled by the original two-column printing, but it reconstructs cleanly. What matters most is the steam: a suet pudding needs two unbroken hours over boiling water, and a pot that runs dry or goes off the boil gives you a heavy, sodden centre.
- Reading the garbled listThe columns have interleaved. The ingredients are: 3/4 lb (3 cups) flour, 1/2 teaspoon salt, 5 tablespoons chopped suet, 3 tablespoons sugar, 1/2 teaspoon grated nutmeg, 1/4 lb (1 cup) currants, 2 teaspoons baking powder, 1 egg, and milk to mix.
- Steady steamingSet the covered mold on a rack in a deep pan with boiling water reaching halfway up, lid on, at a bare simmer. Check every 30-40 minutes and top up with boiling water, never cold, or the pudding stalls.
- SuetBeef suet is sold shredded and floured in Britain and can be found frozen or from a butcher elsewhere; ask for the hard kidney fat and grate it while cold. Vegetable suet works and gives a slightly softer crumb. Chilled grated butter is the usual substitute, though the texture is denser and less light.
- Currants, not raisinsThese are dried Zante currants, small and sharp, not fresh blackcurrants and not the same as raisins. Rinse and dry them, then toss with a spoonful of the measured flour so they stay suspended rather than sinking to one end.
- The mold and the coverA 1 1/2-quart pudding basin or lidded mold is right; fill it no more than three-quarters, as the baking powder will lift it. "Greased paper" means buttered parchment, pleated across the middle to allow expansion, tied down with string or covered with foil.
- Consistency'A stiff dough' is exactly that: firmer than a batter, though softer and wetter than a bread dough. Roughly 3/4 to 1 cup of milk, added gradually, gets you there; too dry and the pudding will be crumbly and dull.
- Yield and sauceServes six to eight. The "sweet sauce" of the period would be a custard, or a hot lemon or vanilla sauce thickened with cornstarch; golden syrup warmed with a little butter is the plainer choice.
- Resting before turning outLet the mold stand five minutes off the heat before inverting. Straight from the steamer the pudding is fragile and tends to tear at the shoulder.
The name is generally traced to the currants speckling the dough, with "dick" understood as a dialect word for pudding, and the dish belongs to the long English tradition of suet puddings boiled or steamed in a cloth or basin - cheap, filling, and cooked over a fire without needing an oven. Recipes under this name appear in British household books from the mid-nineteenth century onward. The last sentence of the entry trails off mid-thought about how "in homely circles" such a pudding was ordinary fare. The baking powder is the later touch - many older suet puddings relied on suet, eggs and long steaming alone for lift.