The famous British pudding - where does it come from? What is the dark, secret history of this most phallic-ally named desserts?
It's a typical product of a cauldron-cooking tradition. If your main cooking vessel is a big cauldron full of water hanging over or standing on a fire, boiling is one of your main methods of cooking. Want to boil a big chunk of beef or mutton? Throw it in the cauldron! Want to boil some turnips or parsnips? Put them in a bag and throw that in the cauldron. Want to cook a stew? Put your meat and other ingredients in a pot/jug, cover it, and simmer it in the cauldron. Due to the large size of the typical cauldron, a variety of dishes can be cooked at the same time in the same cauldron:
Many of these dishes - boiled beef/mutton, boiled vegetables, jugged hare, etc. - continued as important parts of British cuisine even after cauldrons largely fell into disuse.
A large and diverse family of dishes that came out of the cauldron cooking tradition is puddings. Essentially, make a doughy mass of flour and/or other cereal products, and other ingredients, and put it in a bag or other covering, and boil it in water or steam it (originally, boiled in a cauldron). Old-style sweet puddings typically used a dough of flour and fat (often suet), sweetened with dried fruits. Spotted dick is a classic example of this type of sweet pudding; other examples that have survived to today are Christmas pudding and plum pudding. While plum-free Christmas pudding is often called "plum pudding", there are plum puddings that do contain plums, such as this recipe given by Maggie Black in History Today:
1 lb prunes; 1 pt water; 1 lemon; 1 oz Barbados sugar; butter for greasing; 2 large eggs; 4 oz butter; 4 oz soft light brown sugar; pinch of salt; 4 oz soft wholemeal breadcrumbs; 1 oz semolina; brandy butter (Guard Sauce) made with 3 oz butter; 4 oz icing sugar and 1 oz ground almonds.
... Turn into the basin, cover tightly with greased foil and steam for 2 1/2-3 hours.
The pudding mixture could include meat, and be savoury instead of sweet. The Burnsian "chieftain of the pudding race", the haggis, composed of oatmeal, suet, liver, heart, and lungs, and boiled in a stomach is a classic example of a savoury boiled pudding. Another famous example is black pudding.
While spotted dick provides nomenclatural entertainment to many schoolchildren and many adults today, the etymology is quite plain and ordinary: "dick", and also "dog", are cognate with "dough". "Spotted dick" and "spotted dog" can be written in modern English quite innocently as "spotted dough". A suitable modernised version of the name would be "spotted pudding".
