Recipe: Spotted Dick for grown ups

Spotted dick is synonymous with school dinners: it’s one of a field of puddings that divide the nation – like rice pudding and jam roly poly – into those who, haunted by sloppy or stodgy memories, cannot countenance the idea of enduring them again, or those who seek them out in a fit of nostalgia. The joy of writing this Vintage Chef column is that even those dishes I might otherwise avoid, I get to rediscover and share. I was extremely sceptical of blancmange; I treated coronation chicken with suspicion, but in exploring and experimenting with recipes, I was newly converted: blancmange can be heavenly, like an enormous panna cotta; coronation chicken need not be claggy, but can be vibrant and fresh and delicious.

For some reason, by the time I was at school, spotted dick was off the menu. Perhaps dinner ladies had stopped trying to contend with the laughter of schoolchildren that the pudding’s name inevitably drew (the ‘dick’, I’m sorry to report, is simply an old dialect word for ‘dough’, the ‘spotted’, referring to the speckling currants) and instead were offering up semolina, sponge topped with dessicated coconut and pink icing, and – only ever seen in school dining rooms – cornflake tart. Or maybe it had simply fallen out of favour. Perhaps it was simply a quirk of my school and only I and my classmates have been denied this British classic.

Whatever the reason, when I came to spotted dick as a grown up, I didn’t really know what to expect. I thought it would be complicated, for sure. And heavy probably, thanks to the cooking method and the reliance on suet. I eyed the bag of currants with suspicion. I never cook with currants; I assumed they would be gritty and perhaps even a little bitter.