Stop sniggering in the back.
Spotted Dick is an honourable pudding, traditional British food – and British food, when not massacred by indifferent chefs and appalling produce as it was for years in the seventies and eighties, is very good indeed. It has a lot in common with rural French or Italian.
Spotted Dick, though, is something else again. It is one of my absolute favourite things on the face of the Earth. It is a suet-based, raisin-containing slice of heaven, to be served not (as heretics and blasphemers tend to believe) with custard, but with cream or, in extreme situations, a hand-made lemon sauce.
There are many recipes. I use the one in Good Housekeeping, which is in any case a most excellent treasury of basic food wisdom. Although I’m now in a strop with them because their website does not list Spotted Dick at all. Nor, actually, does it list ‘suet’.
You can use vegetrian suet if the notion of cooking the fat from around a cow’s kidney doesn’t appeal to you, which I can completely understand. (You leather-shoe-wearing, gelatine-scarfing wuss.)
The important thing is to look with disdain and moderate distrust upon those who would tell you that a Spotted Dick is a sponge. It is not. This is the cardinal error of many pre-made Dicks. They are light and fluffy. A Spotted Dick is an unapologetically heavy pud. It is there to keep you warm in winter, to use up what’s in the larder, not to give you girlish hips and slim thighs. Go back to your salad, for this is not a white-of-egg omelette or an item compatible in any way with Los Angeles turbofitness. It is a thing of human life and lust and desire.
People who eat Spotted Dick have better sex.
Not because they eat it.
Because they’re those kinds of people.
And with that insane declaration, I leave you. Save only that I invite you to visit my brother’s hilarious online cooking show, at its best when utterly louche. Ladies and gentlemen, I give you: