Spotted Dick

Apparently Heinz has a product called Spotted Dick. From the picture below it seems to be some sort of sponge pudding and you can heat it up in a microwave.

Spotted Dick

Doing a little Google research this evening, I found a little bit of information about spotted dick:

Spotted Dick is a steamed suet pudding containing dried fruit, usually currants. The dessert is especially popular in the United Kingdom, usually served either with custard or with butter and brown sugar. Spotted refers to the currants (which resemble spots), and Dick is a corruption of the word dough.

Looking at my site stats, I have a lot of readers from the United Kingdom, so I’m interested in finding out what the real story is on spotted dick pudding.

Here in America, when I hear the words spotted dick, I don’t think of pudding but then again, in the UK, there are many words which have different meaning here in the United States… example “Rubber”. Hehe. Can you please pass me a rubber? I almost lost it when I heard that in England a few years ago. In England, a rubber is an eraser.

June 26, 2006 · Filed Under Picture of the Day

You may be interested in these related articles:

Comments

4 Responses to “Spotted Dick”

  1. Ainslie on June 27th, 2006 10:34 am

    Spotted Dick used to be an old school dinners favourite and probably still is. I don’t know where the name originated but I suspect that whoever named it had a sense of humour.

    It really has the same meaning here as you would expect and from my recollections always caused quite a lot of schoolboy humour at the dinner table.

  2. Luke on June 27th, 2006 1:28 pm

    The father of a friend of mine went to England once (well, once that I know of…). Not only was he flustered when a woman asked to borrow a rubber from him, but it got even worse when she promised she’d return it. Almost as bad was when his hotel clerk asked if she could knock him up in the morning.

  3. Karen on June 27th, 2006 9:06 pm

    I’ve actually had Spotted Dick…it is similar to English Christmas pudding…I have relatives and friends from the UK and we all share many laughs over some common names of things…
    eg: fag=cigarette ;)

  4. Ainslie on June 29th, 2006 7:36 am

    They tried to change the name in a moment of PC madness to Spotted Richard but it seems people prefer Dick so they had to change it back as it didn’t sell as well.

    Interestingly Richard as in “Richard the Third” is someting that goes down the toilet in Cockney rhyming slang so it’s not really suprising.

Leave a Reply