Welcome back to The Not-So-Great Defector Bake Off, where Kelsey and Chris attempt to complete the technical challenges from the newest season of The Great British Bake Off in their own home kitchens, with the same time parameters as the professional-grade bakers competing on the show.
The technical challenge for the seventh week of the 15th season of The Great British Bake Off was to make a classic old British steamed dessert, delightfully named Spotted Dick. While over on this continent spotted dick is something you hope with all your might will clear up on its own, over there it is an indulgent 175-year-old confection that happens to have been named back when "dick" was a word that, even in civilized conversation, meant "pudding." The "spotted" part comes from dried currants, the inclusion of which gives the finished dick a festive, studded appearance, to say nothing of its most enjoyable pops of flavor.
Spotted dick is not something that is still showing up very often on British dinner tables, the British having moved very reluctantly in recent decades toward fostering a culture where food is enjoyed rather than merely tolerated. Despite its simple delights—it is, after all, both warm and sweet, although like too many British confections it contains not one single grain of salt—spotted dick is a fussy thing to make, featuring grated or shredded suet and wrapped and steamed for a minimum of 90 minutes, work that makes the finished product seem all the more arbitrarily contrived. It's a crumbly grey-to-brown boulder of soaked sponge that tastes mostly like sugar. Probably even the British aristocracy can think of better rewards for two hours of careful labor.
But! For reaching back into another time, and for being called spotted dick, spotted dick deserves an occasional reexamination. It may not be the very most exciting thing to eat, but it is certainly not without its virtues, and as a technical challenge, it presents an interesting set of ingredients and techniques. Also, you get to spend several hours repeating "spotted dick" without anyone demanding that you vacate the premises.
Chris Thompson: First, a word from Kelsey, who regrettably was not able to produce a spotted dick for this edition of The Not-So-Great Defector Bake Off.
Kelsey McKinney: I am very sad to not have been able to compete in The Not-So-Great Defector Bake Off this week, on account of spending eight hours every single day reading my own book aloud (recording an audiobook). It is torture to miss a week when we are making something called SPOTTED DICK, and I hate to abandon our dear Chris in the tent alone. But I will state that I was STUNNED to learn that Chris not only knew what spotted dick was, but was excited to make it, and in fact had been craving making it last week.
CT: It's true! In another week, with another challenge, without Kelsey around to participate I probably would've skipped the bake altogether. But spotted dick! As a devotee of Patrick O'Brian's amazing and perfect Aubrey-Maturin series of novels—and as an enjoyer of the idea of desserts with names like "spotted dick"—I could not pass on this bake. Last week, as we were pondering and then laboring to produce Prue Leith's cloying vegan Parkin, I said aloud at least twice to my bewildered wife that I hoped eventually that the show would get around to this strange steamed suet pudding. So I was very excited when we learned of the Spotted Dick technical bake, and my excitement was even very briefly infectious, before Kelsey realized that she would have to miss the trial.
I feel like I have read about Spotted Dick dozens of times—I came in with the idea in my head that it was the favorite pudding of O'Brian's valiant Captian Jack Aubrey—but searching back through the novels ahead of this bake, I found that the first mention of Spotted Dick doesn't come until early in the fourth book, The Mauritius Command, and even then not at supper time. Instead, there is a particular young gentleman (a midshipman, like an officer cadet in the Royal Navy) aboard the Boadicea—a talented little guy named Richardson who eventually earns the trust and affection of his captain—who carries the unfortunate nickname of "Spotted Dick":
The young gentlemen: he led them a hard life, insisting upon a very high degree of promptitude and activity; but apart from these sessions with the telescope, which they loathed entirely, and from their navigation classes, they thoroughly approved of their captain and of the splendid breakfasts and dinners to which he often invited them, although on due occasion he beat them with frightful strength on the bare breech in his cabin, usually for such high crimes as stealing the gunroom's food or repeatedly walking about with their hands in their pockets. For his part he found them an engaging set of young fellows, though given to lying long in their hammocks, to consulting their ease, and to greed; and in one of them, Mr. Richardson, generally known as Spotted Dick because of his pimples, he detected a mathematician of uncommon promise.
Spotted Dick isn't mentioned again, outside of referring to poor Mr. Richardson, until the final chapters of the eighth book, The Ionian Mission, when for the first time in the series the name refers to food. Once again, Captain Aubrey is engaged with his vessel's midshipmen, this time in his cabin, where he is hosting a breakfast:
It was a cheerful meal. Jack was a good host, and when he had time to concern himself with them he was fond of the little brutes from the midshipmen's berth; furthermore he was in remarkably high spirits and he amused himself and the young gentlemen extremely by dwelling at length on the fact that the country they had just quitted was practically the same as Dalmatia—a mere continuation of Dalmatia—so famous for its spotted dogs. He himself had seen quantities of spotted dogs—had even hunted behind a couple of braces—spotted dogs in a pack of hounds, oh Lord!—while the town of Kutali was positively infested with spotted youths and maidens, and now the Doctor swore he had seen spotted eagles ... Jack laughed until the tears came into his eyes. In a Dalmation inn, he said, by way of pudding you could call for spotted dick, give pieces of it to a spotted dog, and throw the remains to the spotted eagles.
The joke, here, has to do in part with the fact that "spotted dog" is another name for the same pudding. Spotted Dick, the seaman, returns in subsequent novels, now a magnificent "sea-going Apollo." Later, in book 17, The Commodore, Spotted Dick Richardson has been made a captain and is in command of the Laurel, a ship assigned to Aubrey's fleet, which undertakes to bust up the Atlantic slave trade via a series of actions in the Gulf of Guinea. The pudding, after all the breakfast hilarity of the eighth book, is never mentioned again, at least not by the name Spotted Dick. Eventually, by searching for "spotted dog," I was able to confirm that this steamed pudding is, in fact, the captain's favorite. The setting is another cheerful meal at the captain's table, also from The Ionian Mission:
The pudding was Jack's favourite, a spotted dog, and a spotted dog fit for a line-of-battle ship, carried in by two strong men.
"Bless me," cried Jack, with a loving look at its glistening, faintly translucent sides, "a spotted dog!"
"We thought as how you might like one, sir," said Pullings. "Allow me to carve you a slice."
"Do you know, sir," said Jack to Professor Graham, "this is the first decent pudding I have had since I left home. By some mischance the suet was neglected to be shipped; and you will agree that a spotted dog or a drowned baby is a hollow mockery, a white sepulchre, without it is made with suet. There is an art in puddings, to be sure; but what is art without suet?"
All of which is to say, yes, I knew about spotted dick, and with good reason was eager to cook one. And now I will quit retyping the entirety of this 20-volume series of novels inside the body of this blog. Thank you for making it this far!
Ingredients and Shopping
For a centuries-old British foodstuff with a funny name, the shopping list for spotted dick is pretty straightforward. Most of it is standard cupboard crap: flour, baking powder, baking soda, sugars, some citrus, some spice, a little vanilla, plenty of dairy.
The two challenging items are currants, long a dreaded ingredient in these bakes, and suet. Fortunately, by tradition one does not use fresh currants in a spotted dick, probably because it's a pantry-clearing peasant dish, and dried currants are not especially tricky to find, as long as you live within range of a huge grocery cathedral. Suet, on the other hand, is a grody raw lump of hard fat from around the kidneys of cows and sheep, and is not very often used in cooking nowadays. Prue's recipe calls for the use of vegetable suet, which to me sounds even more disgusting, a weird synthetic foodstuff that almost certainly started out as something to be rubbed on axles before working its way into the British diet.
Because I am a weirdo, I know where in the freezer section of a particular local grocery store to find blocks of frozen beef kidney suet. Even more fortunately, I know where to find two of these blocks in my very own basement freezer, leftover from a time early in the pandemic when I was unemployed and spent just about every waking hour providing food and housing to local songbirds. So while the contestants on The Great British Bake Off were handed pre-shredded quantities of industrial byproduct, I was hunkered over a box grater in my kitchen, furiously shredding an extremely unpleasant board-book–sized lump of white and pink animal fat. For my toil, at least I would have the satisfaction of knowing that my Spotted Dick would be the only true Spotted Dick in the competition.
Stage One: Rehydrating Currants, Mixing the Pudding
Prue allotted two hours and 15 minutes for the making of Spotted Dick. This seems like a very long time, but this is an unfamiliar cooking process: As far as I can recall, I have never made a steamed sponge before. Unlike the dread that accompanies the start of most technical bakes, this challenge came with a feeling of hopeful anticipation. You would think this would make it easier to start the timer, but you would be wrong: Because I cared very much about producing a true and good Spotted Dick—not always the case with these stunts—I felt much more anxious than usual; also, because I did not have Kelsey around to buck me up with her usual flow of uplifting words, like "what the fuck is this," "ahahahaha NO NO," and "fuck."
My first item of business after eventually starting the timer was to zest and squeeze one orange and one lemon, to provide the liquid that would be used to rehydrate the currants. Here is where I must mention that due to schedule conflicts I had to do the first part of this bake while also solo-parenting a toddler. This could reasonably have taken the form of plopping her down in front of the television, but my child is lately extremely into helping me cook. I did not think that entrusting certain tasks to a distractible three-year-old—she would want me to say, here, that she will be four in January—would convey any sort of advantage. Quite the opposite, in fact!
She tried her best at zesting, but as there was nothing else for me to do at this early stage but fidget, I did lots of helping, and eventually we got there. The juice, zest, and currants went into a saucepan and over a burner, to simmer.
The instructions next say to "mix the batter." Here is where I got myself into big trouble. Regular readers of this series will recall that, in order to avoid gaining information that is unavailable to the show's contestants, the Defector Idiots solicit outside help—my wife—to edit the baking method of the recipe's online instructions, so that it will match as closely as possible the cruelly pared-down version used for the show. The resulting document often comes to me looking like what it is: chunks of paragraphs and sentence fragments that have been copied and pasted from a website, together with reworded sections and the odd clarifying translation or parenthetical. The formatting is deeply chaotic. In most cases, I then retype this crazy-making slop into a clean and orderly new document, so that we are not attempting to bake from instructions that look like a letter from a serial killer.
Somewhere in all of this messy process, three different words were used in the instructions to describe the raw blob of stuff that would eventually become Spotted Dick: "mixture," "dough," and "batter." Doughs and batters are both mixtures—as are gruels and sauces and spackling compounds—so "mixture" is not super helpful for forming any kind of expectation. When I think of a dough, I think of something that is somewhat dry and notably elastic. I also think of bread, which is chewy. When I think of a cake, I think of something that is moist and sweet. "Batter" is a word that is associated with cake-making; so is "sponge." Spotted Dick is described as a pudding—pudding is a mixture, but the kinds of puddings we eat on this side of the pond do not have doughs or batters—but the instructions also use the word "sponge," implying a cake, which suggests a batter and not a dough.
When you mix 200 milliliters of milk into more than 600 grams of mostly non-hydrated ingredients, what you get is much more like a dough: sticky, heavy, and dry, with pockets of air. It was downright hard to incorporate into a reasonably homogenized goo, especially for an almost-four-year-old, even with the little bit of extra moisture of the rehydrated currants.
I did what any batter-maker would do, to say nothing of a loving father: I added a splash more of the milk. The mixture loosened, and the resulting sludge was much more batter-like, the kind of thing that you would expect to bake up into a sponge. It went very easily into the greased baking bowl that would become its mold.
I felt at this stage that things were going very well. I'd made a batter and gotten it into a greased mold with something like 110 minutes left to go. I checked the instructions for the next step, and my blood froze: Somewhere in my confusion of baking terms and my frustration with the thudding spotted-dick dough, I had forgotten that we would not be baking this pudding, but that it would instead be steaming, closed up inside layers of sealed parchment and foil, and under the heavy lid of a dutch oven. The extra moisture I'd added for ease of mixing would have nowhere to go; it might, in fact, gain additional moisture from the environment inside the cooking vessel. Terrible!
Stage Two: Steaming the Spotted Dick
I had a lot of confusion about how much water to use for steaming, and whether the water should go in cold or preheated. I also had no real sense of how long to leave the Spotted Dick in the steamer, but I figured Prue would not have given us so much time unless the pudding needed at least 90 minutes in there.
The first task would be to rig some sort of cover. The instructions say to use baking paper and aluminum foil, tied with twine. This was easy enough.
I did build a little slack into my setup, reasoning that the pudding might rise in there—it does, after all, contain baking powder—and I wouldn't want it straining and possibly breaking its cover, or suffering the dreaded concertina effect. These turned out to be moot concerns, but I felt (and feel) like a smartypants for having had them in the first place.
The instructions also say to position an overturned plate inside your steaming pot and then to rest your sealed pudding on it, before adding water and commencing with the steam. I assume now that the plate was there to keep the pudding off of the direct heat of the bottom of the pot, but at the time it caused for me some confusion about how much water to use: Was the plate meant also to elevate the pudding above the level of the water?
I didn't want to lose too much time worrying about this stuff. My pudding was sealed up inside there, so presumably the consequences of adding too much water would not be severe. I filled a tea kettle and a saucier with water and brought both quantities to a boil, and then emptied the kettle into the pot around the bowl, and then topped it up with a little more from the saucier, until the pot was a little bit less than half full. I used hot water because it can take water a long time to come to a simmer inside a big dutch oven and I wanted at least 90 minutes of steaming. As Captain Jack Aubrey would say—approving of my choices, naturally—there was not a moment to be lost. The lid was on the pot with 94 minutes left on the timer.
Stage Three: Making Caramel Syrup and Créme Anglaise
Here I was in luck! In an effort to make golden syrup for last week's Parkin bake, I had stupidly and incorrectly made something that could only be called either caramel syrup or watery caramel. For this bake I followed more or less exactly the same method I'd so recently invented, throwing caster sugar into a pan, toasting it a little, adding water, stirring and simmering it until it became golden, and adding little splashes of heated water along the way to keep it loose and syrupy, rather than gluey.
I don't know how long this took. Maybe 30 minutes? When the syrup was reasonably golden, I gave it a squeeze of lemon juice—it's in the ingredients—and poured it into a small jar and put the jar into the fridge. Somewhere in here, my wife returned from work, along with her cousin who is visiting from out of town. They put onto the television an episode of some genuinely appalling psychic talk show featuring Kristen Chenoweth; my child became much harder to wrangle for cooking tasks; and I finally allowed myself a THC edible.
I had a lot of time in hand, with my Spotted Dick steaming away and my syrup finished and only the making of créme anglaise left to complete. We've already made créme anglaise once this season, as the base of the insanely good praline ice cream featured in Caramel Week. It's easy: Mix sugar and egg yolks in a bowl; simmer cream, milk, and vanilla in a saucepan; then gently whisk the latter into the former, before returning the mixture to the heat until it thickens. You can thicken it a lot, if you want, but for this purpose you want a pourable custard, so that it can serve as a condiment for the finished product. That I can recall this stuff from memory is genuinely amazing to me: When Kelsey and I first started this preposterous stunt, I could not have described with confidence any single ingredient or characteristic of créme anglaise, unless it had featured in a very recent episode of The Great British Bake Off. Now I am the master!
I used my child for free labor and set her to the task of whisking together sugar and eggs, while I gutted a vanilla bean and began to simmer the milk and cream.
I then used a ladle and her whisk to incorporate the two mixtures into one ubermixture, poured it back into the saucepan, set it over low heat, and stirred it until it coated the back of a spoon. I poured this through a mesh strainer—sometimes there are congealed bits along the bottom of the pan—into some sort of gravy serving thing that I fished out of a cabinet, covered that with foil, and put it into the refrigerator. I think I still had more than 30 minutes left on the timer.
I started cleaning up the kitchen, which was in a pretty chaotic state. My child immediately vanished; soon I heard giggling coming from the other room, and a little while later she returned with a case of the crazies, and with her face painted like a dog. Not even a spotted dog!
I would be on my own from here on out.
Stage Four: Assembly
I finally pulled my Spotted Dick from the steamer with about four minutes left on the timer, which I reasoned was just long enough to turn it out of the mold and pour syrup onto it. My syrup was somewhat colder than it probably should've been, having sat in the fridge for more than an hour, and it was darker in color than I'd intended, but obviously it was far too late to do anything about any of that.
I could feel through the foil-and-parchment cover that the Spotted Dick had risen during the steaming. I could also feel that it was heavy as hell, which makes sense considering that it is meant to be moist, although I think it is not meant to have the weight of a cinderblock, which mine did. Turned out onto a serving platter, it held together but looked ill.
I guess I'd failed to level it completely in the mold, or possibly it just did not rise uniformly, but the now-bottom of it was rough and uneven, and cracks were already visible where its weight was awkwardly distributed. No one would shout "huzzahs" at this Spotted Dick; certainly you would not serve it to a visiting admiral, not without several apologies. But it did appear to be fully cooked, which would mean that it was at least edible. A triumph! I spent the final 45 seconds or so pouring out that entire goddamn jar of caramel syrup, until the Spotted Dick was wet and glistening and centered in a pool of sticky brown sauce.
The Finished Product
That there is no one here to prompt me with a call to "show Spotted Dick" is genuinely heartbreaking. Say that to a stranger in the bathroom of a nightclub and you are assigning your fate to the cosmos; here in the bakeoff, it is an invitation to share in a final round of encouragement after the completion of a difficult task. Alas.
Here is my Spotted Dick:
Turn this baby around and you will see that the weight of caramel is doing terrible things to the structural integrity of the Dick.
Also, upon cutting into the Spotted Dick, it was impossible to ignore that I put way too much milk into this thing, so that its very center, while volcanic in temperature, was very wet and gluey.
Nevertheless I am here to report that the Spotted Dick is a perfectly fine thing to eat. It's very sugary sweet, but it gets some nice spice from cinnamon and little pops of acidity from the currants and the citrus; its got a rich heaviness from the suet without being unpleasantly unctuous, and the créme anglaise, while also made with sugar, manages to add some delicacy.
It doesn't photograph particularly well, but then they did not have photos back when this pudding was invented. They had ships, sextants, halliards, ratlines! Beating to windward in a fine fresh breeze, trimmed sails, taught bowlines! Duty and honor!
Sorry, without Kelsey here to moderate my behavior, I can get carried away. She'll be back for the next edition, and just in time, for next week is 1970s Week. God preserve us.
