Dating : Would You Like a Spotted Dick?

This classic British dessert is loved by children for two distinct reasons: its taste and its name.

For those unfamiliar with Spotted Dick, it’s a thick suet pudding sweetened with sultanas and industrial quantities of refined sugar. It is served swimming in rich hot yellow custard containing more sugar and colouring and flavourings, the provenance of which it’s probably best not to know. The sugar content of one serving of Spotted Dick and Custard would probably be the government’s recommended intake for an entire month.

The adjective, Spotted, is used because of the effect of the sultanas. They look like brown spots dotted throughout the pudding. As for the name ‘Dick’, who knows? But thereby hangs the other attraction of this sweet dessert.

“Would you like a Spotted Dick?” spoken by an adult, usually your mother or grandmother, never fails to amuse any young boy between the ages of four and fourteen. Even after hearing it for the 250th time during your young life.

When young, I had therefore had licence to use the word dick at home without censure if used within the context of this suet pudding. The most entertaining activity, after being served the dessert, was to see the dried prune-like expressions on my parent’s faces knowing the discussion I was having with my six-year-old brother over who has the largest Spotted Dick was, maybe not, as entirely innocent as our expressions.

Profanity, and other selected words considered inappropriate, were naturally not permitted in a household union between my father, the son of Southern English Methodists and my mother, the daughter of Scottish Calvinists and sometime Salvation Army officers.

Watching my parent’s faces contort, as if sucking on a particularly bad-tasting sweet while wrestling with not wanting to admit that dick was also a bad word, was exquisite.

The situation was equally entertaining at our Church of England infant and junior school. Spotted Dick was all but guaranteed to be on the school lunch menu at least once a week. It was cheap and popular. The young boys and girls attending my school were not immune to the obvious attractions of teasing the often pious teachers. I’m sure it continues to this day.

The highlight of the afternoon, after a lunch with Spotted Dick, would be religious studies with the school vicar. There would be an eager competition to be the first boy to find a food link in a bible story the priest was telling us. We jockeyed to be the first to say, “I’d had a spotted dick but it‘s gone now.”

The priest always sighed at having heard the same joke at the same time for the previous ten years, his eyes lifting to the heavens as if pleading for patience and guidance. This made it all the more amusing.

Spotted Dick was a gift horse that I, and many like me looked in the eye and took with an untrammelled and simple, but not entirely innocent pleasure.