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Is this the end of the line for Spotted Dick, Jam Roly-Poly and Sussex Pond Pudding?

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Only the English would call a tasty dessert Spotted Dick.

This morning’s Guardian had an article on the uncertain future of the Great English Pudding…

Britain’s puddings are under threat. According to research from English Heritage, only 2% of British households eat a daily homemade dessert, while a third never bake, boil or steam one at all.

“Sweet puddings are closely intertwined with British history and it would be a huge shame for them to die out,” said the charity’s senior curator of history, Dr Andrew Hann. But he went on to suggest that, at the current rate of decline, the British pudding will be extinct in 50 years.

The Guardian called in American, Tim Dowling who wrote this rather entertaining article about how he tried to cook ten classic English puddings and was somewhat under-awed by the likes of Sussex Pond Pudding and Jam Roly-poly.

The names alone bring back happy childhood memories. But I’ll confess I’ve never tried to make any of them. Am I an ex-pat being nostalgic for a vanished England?

What is very striking is how long all these puddings take. They belong to a different age.

Our dad would spend weeks making a Xmas fruitcake which was thoroughly delicious and well worth the wait. And then course, there’s Xmas Pud…..

Do any of you have happy memories of favourite childhood puddings?
What desserts do you serve at home in 2025?

If I come over for supper will I get Profiteroles, Tiramisu or Baked Alaska?

Or will you delight and surprise me with a classic English dessert?

I don’t think he does Jam Roly-polies. But my Stockholm pal @DuCo01 is Spånga’s King of Cakes.

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Comments

  2. Spotted Dick is a tiresomely bland pudding. I suspect half of the infatuation is Carry On levels of mirth.

    However, the very best pudding in the world is a Syrup Sponge pudding, served with custard, natch. The actual very best one ever is the ones that used to be served at lunch at Sainsburys staff canteen in Dorking in the around 1987. The cook, a chap by the name of Mark, was a chef who had tired of working restaurants. He would have won Masterchef on this pudding alone. Although Gregg may have been too busy imploding at the opportunity to mention a spotted dick.

  3. My mother used to make the most gorgeous treacle pudding.
    Never tried to make it myself.
    Looking at the Guardian list, there are a couple I have never heard of, a couple I have never tried and the rest I couldn’t care if I never ate them again.
    Interestingly there are no crumbles in the list, which is something I occasionally make: apple, or rhubarb or rhubarb and strawberries.

  4. My Mum would spend hours, days, making the Christmas pud every year. Until one Christmas lunch – I was late teens maybe – we finally all admitted we hated Christmas pud, even her. From then on it was bought, because obviously you still have to have it. Hers were better than the bought tbh, but it was/will always be flipping horrible.

  5. We very rarely have dessert with meals. Whilst i do have fond memories of my mums desserts / baking when younger (don’t we all !) even then it was an occasional thing and not with every meal. These days I only tend to have when going out for a “posh” dinner. If we do have dessert these days, it tends to be pure fruit (and even then we will often have the fruit before the meal – it’s supposedly better for you and a common practice here in Asia).

    That said, I do occasionally have a craving for the king of puddings – sticky toffee pudding. Not gotten around to making my own yet, so it will be one from M&S. Other than that, I will occasionally do an Apple Crumble or Raspberry & White Chocolate Cheesecake (equal parts mascarpone/cream cheese plus melted white chocolate and double cream, so very healthy!)

  6. My Mum made the best lemon meringue pie ever and that’s a fact. Went off to London and at the end of the first term took my new best mate home to Aberdeen. I told him my Mum is a fantastic cook, spends all day in the kitchen, makes everything from scratch.
    “Mum, please make us the best lemon meringue pie ever”.
    “Of course, my darling son” .
    Few minutes later I wander into the kitchen to see Mum emptying the packet of Royal Lemon Meringue Pie filling into a mixing bowl.
    The dream was over even if the pie was bloody delicious.

  7. I have enough trouble keeping my paunch at a level which might be called ‘substantial’ without adding puddings to menu. The last time I remember eating these sorts regularly was at primary school.

    • I’m with you there, @Gatz. I suspect my blissful pudding memories also date from schooldays.

      Our poor children must have had very deprived childhoods, Almost the only dessert that has been a regular in our family is fresh Öland strawberries and ice cream in the summer.

      That and home-made apple crumble.

  8. There used to be a teashop in Nether Stowey, now sadly long gone, that served the best summer pudding you were ever likely to get anywhere. I’m a sucker for traditional British puddings. Jam roly-poly, treacle pudding, sticky toffee pudding, Christmas pudding etc. etc. My dear old granny used to make a mean homemade lemon meringue pie from an ancient Be-Ro recipe book. Guaranteed 100% British stodge.

  9. i just asked Mrs KFD what her favourite dessert was.

    Her answer was kalvdans. I had no idea what it was.

    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kalvdans

    As you might have guessed, she grew up on a farm and therefore had access to unpasteurised milk.

    Kalvdans (lit. ’calf dance’) is a classical Scandinavian dessert. It is made from unpasteurized colostrum milk, the first milk produced by a cow after giving birth.

    Kalvdans has a long tradition in Swedish cuisine. It is mentioned in the encyclopedia Project af swensk grammatica from 1682. The encyclopedia mentions kalvost (lit. ’calf-cheese’) as an alternative name.[2] The name kalvdans refers to the jiggly pudding-like consistency of the dessert.[3] Swedish emigrants brought the tradition of kalvdans to North America, as well. It is however rarely consumed today, as very few families keep cows of their own.[

    Another dish that will probably soon disappear.

  10. Spotted Dick is a resounding no, but Jam roly poly…we were once (about 15 years ago) on a camping holiday in Cornwall, somewhere near Bodmin, and a very old village pub (wish I could remember the name and the village) served it as a dessert. It was absolute heaven, and we went back twice more during that fortnight. The rest of the menu was fab as well.

  11. We used to have dead man’s leg at school – a long roll of pastry with either jam or mincemeat in. Also steamed sponge with or without sultanas in, and later, chocolate sponge with sheets of melted granulated sugar on top – all served with bright yellow aluminium jugs of custard. We used to wolf them down.

    Not that I ever ate them, but my dad and mum used to talk about pre- and post-war puddings – horrible things like junket, sago, semolina pudding, tapioca pudding. We never even had rice pudding or trifle as my mum hated them, She once had to spend all afternoon at the dining table because she refused to eat the rice pudding put in front of her.

    My favourites were Bakewell pudding (which used 8 egg yolks) and walnut meringue (which used 8 egg whites) – we had to have them together. Delicious.

  12. I only remember stuff like treacle sponge from school dinners with lumpy lukewarm custard. Disgusting! I’ll have the cheesecake or pavlova please.

    • Very true @yorkio.

      It was slightly odd that the Guardian brought in someone who had no experience of eating or cooking these puddings. Perhaps it seemed more objective.

      Tim Dowling certainly took the assignment seriously. But if the project had been carried out by someone with happy memories of at least some of these puds, perhaps the readers would have been infused with more enthusiasm to try one themselves.

      Look below and you’ll see that I’ve found some recipes written by enthusiastic cooks. i got a completely different perspective.

  14. At school on the shared table a friend had been told by his older brother that rice pudding and gravy was a marvellous treat. On the day when rice pudding was due he hid the gravy jug under the table and after the rice pudding was doled out instead of the jam he poured some of the brown ‘custard’ into it. It looked absolutely disgusting I don’t think it tasted that good either. I know I didn’t taste it as to this day I hate gravy.

    Another friend would save any left over rice pudding in his handkerchief and put it in his blazer pocket to eat later in lessons. That’s what a grammar school education does for you.

    No love for frogspawn?

  15. I decided to find some recipes for these dishes by cooks with great enthusiasm

    Mary Berry’s Sussex pond pudding is packed with apples (as well as traditional lemon) for a foolproof result. The result is even more delicious!

    https://www.bbc.co.uk/food/recipes/sussex_pond_pudding_with_23049

    Two hairy and enthusiastic bikers..

    Try a traditional English dessert with tangy slices of lemon in a rich butterscotch sauce. Serve with double cream or ice cream.

    https://www.bbc.co.uk/food/recipes/lemony_pond_pudding_23282

  17. I haven’t heard of several of these! I’m not surprised these type of desserts are disappearing- there is now so much more variety and our tastes have changed. These were all relatively cheap to make, very filling and some used up leftovers, like bread. We could make a similar list of meal main courses – how many people now eat liver, offal, vegetables boiled to death and so on..?

    We rarely have a heavy dessert, although Devon Apple cake appears occasionally. We used to have bread and butter pudding (and bread pudding), pineapple upside down pudding, and Debden pudding which is very chocolatey. The exception is Christmas pudding, and Mrs. T makes the best ones in the world, no argument. She uses her mum’s old recipe, and it is light, very fruity, a bit crunchy with nuts and not too sweet. She also makes her own mincemeat for mince tarts, which is similarly delicious and not over sweet. The only good things about Christmas.

  19. I am definitely a savoury tooth tiger, rather than a sweet tooth. I grew up with there always being a pudding at the end of the main meal of the day, but being the ungrateful firstworlder that I am, I learnt to treat fruit salad, trifle, milk puddings and crumbles with disdain. I came into contact with the stodgy stuff mentioned above, but only from a distance. Like a previous mention, early in my childhood, there was family agreement that Christmas pudding was a waste of stomach capacity and I’ve never touched it since.
    Eating out now, it’s not often that anything sweet for afters catches my eye. Given the opportunity, I will head for the cheeseboard. So you will rightly assume that this loss of culinary cultural tradition holds no fear for me.
    In answer to what you will get if you come round here for tea, well, I only make desserts at Christmas. The family know that I only do three desserts, and they are entirely satisfied with getting each of them. (Our Christmasses last at least a week, for context.) Ginger Cream – a doddle of a dessert with just four ingredients that only require mixing together, but tastes sumptuous; New York baked cheesecake; Panettone bread and butter pudding. The last would be my death row pudding ( I think we’ve done that thread before.)

  20. My only experience with English desserts was in 1982 when I spent a summer in Torquay (of all places…) and was served the exact same supper every day for a month by the family we stayed with (“we” being six Scandinavian teenage girls).
    First an individual pie (all claimed to have different fillings, all tasted the same: nothing), with green peas, baked beans and – if you were lucky, so not very often – a few chips. Then the dessert was put in the middle of the table; a huge jello mould (of a different colour every day – all tasted the same: nothing) doing the shimmy before our eyes. We soon stopped eating it.

    Then one day they had cooked a rice pudding from scratch, and thinking it would taste something like Ris a’la Malta or risgrynsgröt we all heaped lots of it onto our plates. After the first taste, we all looked at each other in a panic, before sneaking out to flush the abomination down the toilet, one after the other (to leave no trace of it and not disappoint our hosts, who thankfully never ate with us).

    The desserts I grew up with were much nicer:
    Petit Choux filled with custard and whipped cream, home-made Italian gelato (orange or strawberry usually), a big pineapple gâteau every Friday night, Chocolate pudding & custard sauce, Creme Brulee, Cassata ice cream, Fruit salads (not a favourite of mine, I only ate the cherries), Banana Split, Baked Alaska, French Toast (the Swedish version with sugar and cinnamon), Risplättar med sylt (a sort of small pancakes with leftover boiled rice in the batter, served with jam), fried donuts, and all kinds of fruit pies, crepes filled with custard and “Bird Bath” (basically Floating Island but small poached egg-shaped meringues, a Hungarian version of the classic dessert).
    All home-made by mainly my mum, alongside every type of cake, cookie, biscuit, roll etc that you can imagine. All delicious.

  21. This is from the 2006 article linked in TD’s article:

    Ten most endangered savouries;

    · Bath chaps
    · Jugged hare
    · Brawn
    · Squirrel casserole
    · Bedfordshire clanger (scrag end of mutton with kidneys)
    · Pan haggerty (fried onions and potatoes)
    · Hogs pudding
    · Tripe and onion
    · Faggots
    · Bread and dripping

    Ten most threatened puddings

    · Calf’s foot jelly
    · Junket
    · Sussex pond pudding (suet and lemon)
    · Kentish pudding pie (rice and pastry)
    · Dorset dumplings (apples and suet)
    · Lardy cake
    · Simnel cake
    · Malvern pudding (fruit crumble)
    · Singin hinnies (fried scone)
    · Spotted dick

    Seems I’ve been making Pan Haggerty without knowing it all these years. I remember being outraged when my friend Michael Cross refused to come to tea because they were having bread and dripping, or bread and scrape as my grandmother called it. It’s odd, because Sunday lunch generated a fair amount of dripping, but none of us ever felt moved to spread it on bread and eat it. No idea what my mother did with it.

    Although I’ve not had any for years, I’d be sad if lardy cake disappeared. I love it – heart attack on a plate though it may be. Pleased to see that all the online recipes have lard in them, not some vegan alternative.

  22. A gipsy tart made a regular appearance at our school. I gave in to temptation quite often but felt somewhat ashamed after due to the sickly sweetness. Otherwise, school desserts were mostly a let down. Dry sponges that could not be saved with any kind of custard or sauce. Anyway, enough about the dinner ladies.

    My mother was the source of most of my pudding delight. Queen Of Puddings, a sensation. Apple Amber, a favourite best served with ice cream. My mother’s mother did a Honeycomb Mould, tremendous. My mother managed to conjour up a main course and sweet everyday of the week for her expectant family though now and again there was an exasperated – I’ve not done a pudding, you’ll have to have fruit.

    • My mother was an awful cook, and although she would occasionally attempt a clootie pudding it could be called an unqualified success. Her tablet was sensational though, which may contribute to my appointment to have a tooth pulled this afternoon.

        • I’d never heard of Tablet until vey recently when a Scottish pal mentioned it when she lamented the dishes that Scotland is famous for.

          It looks like classic comfort food,

          i looked at the other dishes that the Scottish granny was making

          Rumbledethumps. Cullen Skink.

          Such wonderful names.

          • I recall reading about someone staying at a B and B in Scotland and had some tablet left on the bed to eat.

            Unfortunately they thought it was a tablet of soap and couldn’t understand why it didn’t lather.

            A favourite word is bubbly-jock

  23. Thanks everyone. I am really enjoying reading about your memories, both pleasant and highly unpleasant.

    There is definitely something about desserts that strikes a very powerful chord.

    I went to a James Yorkston and Nina Persson gig last night with DuCool and he told me that the Guardian article had over a thousand comments. Worth a quick browse to read about readers’ favourites.

    Say what you like about Tim Dowling’s article, it certainly got people talking. There are so many puddings that I’ve never heard of. I must research a little more.

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