| Spotted dick | |
| Place Of Origin: | United Kingdom |
| Type: | Pudding |
| Main Ingredient: | Suet, dried fruit, flour, sugar, milk, baking powder |
| No Recipes: | true |
| No Commons: | true |
Spotted dick (also known as spotted dog or railway cake) is a traditional British steamed pudding, historically made with suet and dried fruit (usually currants or raisins) and often served with custard.
Non-traditional variants include recipes that replace suet with other fats (such as butter), or that include eggs to make something similar to a sponge pudding or cake.[1]
Spotted is a reference to the dried fruit in the pudding (which resemble spots). The word dick refers to pudding. In late 19th century Huddersfield, for instance, a glossary of local terms stated: "Dick, plain pudding. If with treacle sauce, treacle dick." This sense of dick may be related to the word dough.[2] In the variant name spotted dog, dog is a variant form of dough.[3]
The dish is first attested in Alexis Soyer's The Modern Housewife or, Ménagère, published in 1849,[4] in which he described a recipe for "Plum Bolster, or Spotted DickRoll out two pounds of paste ... have some Smyrna raisins well washed".[5]
The name "spotted dog" first appeared in 1855, in C.M. Smith's "Working-men's Way in the World" where it was described as a "very marly species of plum-pudding". This name, along with "railway cake", is most common in Ireland where it is made more similar to a soda bread loaf with the addition of currants.[6]
The Pall Mall Gazette reported in 1892 that "the Kilburn Sisters ... daily satisfied hundreds of dockers with soup and Spotted Dick".[7]
The name has long been a source of amusement and double entendres; reportedly restaurant staff in the Houses of Parliament decided to rename it "Spotted Richard" so it was “less likely to cause a stir”.[8]