🇬🇧 How to Make Spotted Dick

Craving Spotted Dick? On FoodNeverComes the food never actually comes — so here's how to make real Spotted Dick at home, in about 2 hr 15 min, with stuff you probably already have.

🛒 Ingredients

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• 250g self-raising flour
• 125g shredded suet (beef or vegetable)
• 75g caster sugar
• 150g currants
• zest of 1 lemon
• 150ml whole milk
• a pinch of salt
• butter, for the basin
• custard, to serve

👩‍🍳 Method

1. Suet, not butter. Suet melts later and at a higher temperature than butter, leaving small pockets as the pudding steams — that open, light crumb is the whole character of a suet pudding and butter will not reproduce it.
2. Mix the dry ingredients, currants and zest, then bring together with the milk into a soft, slightly sticky dough. Do not knead it.
3. Roll into a log, wrap loosely in buttered baking parchment and then foil, with a pleat down the middle of both. The pleat gives it room to expand; wrapped tight, it comes out dense and cracked.
4. Steam for 1½ to 2 hours over simmering water, topping the water up from the kettle so it never boils dry. Cold water added to the pan drops the temperature and the pudding sinks.
5. Unwrap, slice thickly, and serve with a great deal of hot custard.
6. The name is plain description: spotted for the currants, and dick is an old dialect word for pudding. Schools and naval galleys have served it for the better part of two centuries.