English folk will be saying "Oooh! Pass the custard." but hopefully this may amuse or at least disgust those from other shores.It is one of a series of photos Katie took in Sainsbury's, while marvelling at and mocking what passes as food in England.
You guys really don't want to see her photo of the meatballs!
Rest assured I shall be returning the favour when I get to the States next April and shall post the results.
27 comments:
Good lessons here on English cuisine and language differences. The flapjacks look delish!
What does it mean on the pudding package when it says: "...and topped with a serving"?
A serving of what?
A pudding, you say? I do want to see the photo of the meatballs!
FB is good for some things
I don't know which is worse, "spotted dick" or "moist suet".
Haha Dive and Katie. Spotted Dick is much more yummy than moist suet.
Fortunately for those of us with a colonial upbringing, our great grandmothers brought the recipe for spotted dick with them although I confess I've not made it in quite a while. Perhaps I should have said "cooked" it. :))
Ms M: I think the photo cut out the bottom line. It should read "… and topped with a serving of some kind of disgusting, synthetic faux-custard."
Cali: You really don't! Hee hee. I shall have to check out your link when I get home from work as FæcesBook and YouTube are blocked here.
Katie: Mmmmm … Moist suet! You've really not lived until you've had a moist suet massage … er …
Mme: As a kid I always loved those stodgy suet puddings; spotted dick, treacle pud, et al.
Made with proper fake custard from a "Birds" tin; unfeasibly yellow and powdery.
Yikes!
I beg your pardon, I brought you up eating good food!and taught you to cook.. one must sometimes have a little yuk in food!
And you loved treacle pudding and custard .....made from a birds custard tin........
Yay for treacle pud! If ever I want to gain twenty pounds in a hurry I'll try that again.
And what on earth did Birds use to get that indescribably radioactive yellow colour?
Admittedly it was yummy, but it probably made your poo glow in the dark.
10.7 grams of saturated fat?!?!
I grimaced at the "suet" but Beryl's "treacle" is even worse. How is that vegetarian?
Yay for saturated fat, Robyn.
Hee hee.
Sheesh! I would never eat pre-packaged crap like this; all you have to do is read the ingredients and picture putting those things in your mouth and it cures you of supermarket produce for life.
As for "treacle pud", it's a weird misnomer. What we call treacle pud over here is a steamed suet pudding (made in a basin and turned out upside-down - and yes, I used to make mine with vegetarian "suet") and then you pour good old Lyle's Golden Syrup over the top and serve it with custard.
Way too fattening for me these days but I loved it when I was a kid.
Hee hee, Lupine Lady; you did indeed talk up this post.
I dread to think what the ingredients are in this pre-packaged version, let alone what the spots might be.
spotted dick in a can...i think that says it all, sugar! xoxox
Ah, the words "dick" and "can" do indeed conjure up some unfortunate misunderstandings, Savannah.
xoxox
As a fan of Patrick O'Brian's novels about the British Navy in Napoleon's time, I'm ecstatic to see that spotted dick is still a going dish in England.
How about "drowned baby", that other charmingly-named dessert they kept eating in the gunroom of the HMS Surprise? Can you get that in a supermarket?
(Patrick O'Brian even gave us an officer, Richard somebody, whose shipboard nickname was Spotted Dick because of the pimples he'd had as a midshipman.)
Gosh thank goodness you put the record straight halfway down the comments list Dive. I was reeling at the thought of you buying one of these ready made puddings. Eek! Much worse that Katie would think we actually BUY them and not just walk past them in the aisle tutting and shaking our heads. No, no, we MAKE them. They are yummy and, depending on the ingredients you buy, you can make lighter, healthier versions. I love Spotted Dick and Treacle Pudding and all those sort of school dinnery things! MMmmmmm I rarely have them though :( I do look forward to what you can show us when you go to the USA Dive. Snigger. How ARE you two coping, by the way, with this separation? October, April? This is months OMG it must be agony.
You Brits certainly have some odd food names. Im gonna stick with you bangers and mash. Washed down with a dark ale of course. Anyone want a taste of my banger?
Snigger, Mark.
Ms M I would think the rest of the writing goes out of picture. We don't have anything called a 'serving'. Not without an 'of' anyway lol.
Thank you for the explanations. There's enough info here to start an online pudding reference site :)
LMAO! I can't believe the stuff you guys have over there. AMAZING.
Moist. Suet.
And Dive called it "pud."
I will go no further on the subject.
Surely we Americans have plenty of weird foods. I just can't think of any at the moment.
Oh wait. Cheez Whiz.
Well, once I figured out what WTF meant, I thought shoot, I know what spotted dick is, having read all sorts of English novels and watched BBC TV, and the fact that 'pud' is just what dessert is called, as in 'you won't get any pud if you don't eat your beets...'
It sure is a funny name, tho. Any interesting derivation?
Sarah: Most of our weird puddings date back to the time of Henry the Eighth at least, though an awful lot of them were simply icky mixtures of animal fat, sugar and spices and seemed merely an exercise in combining what were then astronomically expensive ingredients for displays of obscene wealth rather than being anything you might want to put in your mouth.
Drowned baby sounds great, though it's probably just as well that I have no infants around the house or I might be tempted to try it.
Lynn: the very idea of a healthier, lightweight treacle pud is hilarious, as the proper version is more dense than lead and has more fat in it than a roomful of Americans. If you know of a recipe that won't add twenty pounds to my saggy belly, please let us all know.
Mark: Yay for bangers and mash! And bubble and squeak, too.
We don't have anything called dark ale over here so I'm not sure what you mean (unless it's Guinness).
What we do have on draught at the village inn is Leinie's, though I was upset when they stopped making Leinenkügel's Big Butt Doppelbock; that was awesome!
Lynn: Ah, but we do have serving wenches! You can't beat having your bangers and mash dished up by a buxom serving wench.
Ms M: You might want to go here:
http://www.puddingclub.com/puddingclub.html
Katherine: You REALLY don't want to try spotted dick! Your new svelte and lissom self would disappear in the twinkle of an eye.
Petrea: So what's the US meaning of pud that I'm missing out on? I seem to recall it appearing in Frank Zappa's "Broken Hearts Are For Assholes" in a particularly nasty outtro about "bottom sex", but other than that I have no idea.
Hee hee.
Katie will be taking me on a visit to a US supermarket to hunt for bizarre foodstuffs and I am confident I shall get quite a few blog posts out of that!
Cynthia: Mmmmm … Beets! I'd far rather have beets than pudding, but then I lost my sweet tooth decades ago. Probably just as well for my waistline!
The internet is awash with boring and unfeasible derivations for spotted dick; I'm sure its origins are far more dubious than the official versions.
LOL Dive you're incorrigible.
Yes you're right it is usually full of fat but if you make the puddings with light sugar, light margarine, etc, you can at least lessen it. It's not fat-free of course, but considerably better than the orig. and still tastes fab!
BTW 'more fat in it than a roomful of Americans' - er, Dive, I think you might need a lesson on how to keep on the right side of your girl and her many friends and relations....cough.
Lynn I'm doing the best I can to teach Dive not to insult people, but you know this is going to take some time!
Lynn: I am sorely tempted to try it but I think I'll keep that devilishly syrupy temptation at arm's length for the time being, bhaving just made cookies and flapjacks.
Katie and her family are lovely and slim, by the way, so I hope I got away with that one.
Katie: I AM trying … Honest!
Very trying.
Hee hee, "Spotted Dick" . We bring food to my grad class. I brought Kielbasa today. We have had "weiners and balls".
Hee hee!
I'm not sure I'd want to put weiners and balls into my mouth, Neetzy, but they sure sound fun to look at!
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