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Food and Drink

Naughty names for nice food
glendabyline

We got ourselves some spotted dick the other day, and we laughed like crazy as we boiled it up and ate it down.

It’s not very often you can boil up a spotted dick and not get anyone in trouble, including yourself.

First of all spotted dick doesn’t usually come in a tin. But we’re not in England, and I’m not likely to make it from scratch or otherwise get a homemade version, so tinned it was. It was good enough, although a bit heavy going, which, apparently it can be, say those who are more versed in such matters than the likes of me.

The fact is, spotted dick was originally made with suet, and this tinned one had enough hydrogenated vegetable oil to grease a tractor axel. Perfect for a rainy day and a workout on a miserable dank heath, were one handy. But the taste was nice and rich, laden with lots of caramelized sugar and molasses undertones, a rich cake of a pudding with scads of raisins.

And it should have been for the nearly seven dollars we paid for a wee tin of it, no doubt because it was imported all the way from Jolly Old. And those shipping fuels, well that’s another story.

I suppose we shouldn’t even have bought it, what with the inherent stupidity in buying such long-distance exotica. But I’ve always wanted to experience or at least gaze upon spotted dick ever since hearing its crazy name. Spotted dick? Who on Earth came up with that?

But once you see one, the "spotted" part is pretty obvious, due to all the dark dotty raisins. But the "dick" end of it? Lord knows from whence that cometh, so I turned to Martha Barnette’s Ladyfingers and Nun’s Tummies , one of the best little reads about food names you can get for your money.

And this is what I found: First she wonders if spotted dick keeps the same company as the Swahili pili-pili , a very hot pepper and slang for "penis", which you may want to keep in mind the next time you visit the east coast of Africa.

The same goes for an equally suggestively shaped Korean pepper called golchu ; likewise for another from Louisiana/East Texas special called, not surprisingly, peter pepper.

However, unlike these prickly little rascals, a big round of heavy pudding is not in the least dick-like. But according to the Oxford English Dictionary, "dick" was used to mean "plain pudding" ’round the mid-1800s, about 10 years before it was ever recorded as vulgar slang for "penis".

And before that "dick" was the name for a hard cheese, which, when dressed with a treacle sauce was called "treacle dick", a name almost as endearing as its spotted cousin.

It’s a good, decent sort of explanation. Although it’s quite hard to see how the same word came to be used for two seemingly unrelated entities, a penis and a pudding being what they are. Until you learn that "dick" was also slang for a riding whip, and perhaps at that point there was strung some linguistic line of connection, albeit one that still leaves the plain pudding – puddink? puddick? – out of the picture entirely. Unless it was one of those quaint rhyming Cockney situations, which no amount of explanation can ever straighten out.

In some British circles, spotted dog has now become the preferred, more genteel name for this traditional dessert. But most food history books show spotted dog in much earlier days as its own unique pudding, quite apart from the naughty spotted dick, with raisins or currants stuck on the outside of a cylindrical shape to give the fat pudding log-dog its spots.

To further confuse the issue, Ireland has its own form of spotted dick, a sweet soda bread with raisins or currants.

As for other naughty names for food, you can’t go too far into Ladyfingers and Nun’s Tummies without running into a host of them pointing to one singular, humbling fact. We North Americans must be among the biggest humourless prudes on Earth when it comes to naming food, onomatopoeically or otherwise.

We sport nothing even remotely close to nun’s farts ( Nonnafuerzla ), tasty fried homemade noodles tossed into soups or served with powdered sugar and coffee in Germany. Or the nun’s farts ( pet de nonne , sometimes euphemized to nun’s sighs) served in certain regions of France and Switzerland – noisily deep-fried fritters sprinkled with fine sugar.

In southern Italy they have charming and delicious zinne di monaca (nun’s tits) – round Neapolitan cakes topped with icing and a candied cherry. And the cheeky little nuns’ tummies, which made it into the title of the book, are sweet egg puddings you’ll find in Portugal, so-named because you supposedly will become "fat as a nun" (or at least some nuns) if you eat too many.

Some regions of South America also serve up nun’s sighs ( suspiro de monja ), although sometimes they go by the naughtier name bolas de friale (friar’s balls or monk’s balls), which I’m sure you’ll try to seek out next time you’re there, now that you have the terminology down pat.

By comparison, when New Englanders named a similar type of fritter, they chose the much stodgier "Baptist cake" because it’s dipped in hot oil, as Baptists are dipped in water (from the Greek baptein , to dip).

About the closest we get to a bit of tweaking fun in Canuckland is devil’s food cake (named for its chocolaty darkness, as opposed to angel food’s lightness) and the pope’s nose, which, contrary to prairie indications otherwise, is not the neck of the chicken kicking around loose in the roasting pan. It’s the fatty little bump on the rear end of the fowl, likely originating from a dig at Catholics during the reign of James II in England. And how naughty is that?

Glenda Bartosh is an award-winning freelance writer who is about to meet a friend for a cappuccino, so named for the dull gray or brown habits worn by an austere order of monks known as Capuchins.