The Great Gastropod Pudding Off

Support for this show comes from Pure Leaf Iced Tea.

When you find yourself in the afternoon slump, you need the right thing to make you bounce back.

You need Pure Leaf Iced Tea.

It's real brewed tea made in a variety of bold flavors with just the right amount of naturally occurring caffeine.

You're left feeling refreshed and revitalized, so you can be ready to take on what's next.

The next time you need to hit the reset button, grab a Pure Leaf Iced Tea.

Time for a tea break?

Time for a Pure Leaf.

With a Spark Cash Plus card from Capital One, you earn unlimited 2% cash back on every purchase.

And you get big purchasing power.

So your business can spend more and earn more.

Capital One, what's in your wallet?

Find out more at capital1.com/slash Spark Cash Plus.

Terms apply.

I'm Tom.

I'm from the Great British Bake Off once upon a time, many years ago.

What year?

What year?

2016, I think?

Which was the last one that was on the BBC.

My name's Selassie, I'm making Spotted Dick, and I was on 2016 Bake Off.

My name's Jan.

What year are you at?

So, the UK, I believe it's Series 8,

and in the US, I believe it's Series 5.

So, see, I'm blushing already.

This is why it's face made of the radio.

Oh my god, Tom!

Selassie!

Yeah!

Yeah!

It was really hard not to fangirl excessively.

I was like a schoolgirl meeting the Beatles.

It was overwhelming.

Yes, we are huge fans of the Great British Bake Off here at Gastropod.

And so imagine our delight, and by delight, I mean sheer unadulterated ecstasy when three of our favorite bake-off stars agreed to take part in the first ever great Gastropod put-off.

That pud, if it's not totally obvious, it's short for pudding, and we right now are freaking out so much we haven't introduced ourselves.

Or even told you what you're listening to, which is Gastropod, the podcast, or should I say pudka?

Oh my god, that's bad.

No, you shouldn't.

Okay, the podcast that's full of pudding puns and also looks at food through the lens of science and history.

I'm Nicola Twilley.

And I'm Cynthia Graeber.

And a quick word to those of you who listen with your kids, our baking contestants all will be making a version of the classic British pudding, Spotted Dick.

And you can see where this is going.

This episode is filled with junior high-level anatomy jokes and a couple of mild curse words, so you've been warned.

This episode all began with Cynthia's great passion for a very particular pudding, sticky toffee pudding.

I fell in love with sticky toffee pudding a few years ago once I realized it wasn't, you know, American-style butterscotch pudding.

And then I asked my partner Tim to make it for me for my birthday this year.

And Tim texted me because I'm British and sticky toffee pudding is a very British pudding.

Or so I thought.

In any case, you sent him the perfect recipe.

He made the batter, he put it in the pan, and then he freaked out.

It looked nothing like any cake batter he knew.

He was so worried it would fail that he literally ran out to the store to get new supplies for a second batch.

But we did put it in the oven and by the time he came back, we could tell it was the real deal.

Would I have failed you?

You guys really need to trust me when it comes to pudding.

But this led me to all sorts of questions.

Of course, I wanted to know where did sticky toffee pudding come from.

But then I had a more basic question: What is pudding?

Is it any type of dessert like the pudding course you see at restaurants?

Yes, and also no.

And even though I am something of a pudding expert, being British, pudding is basically my birthright.

But even so, I found that I too had pudding questions.

Like, spotted dick, why would you call a pudding a dick?

Or a duff?

Or a dead man's arm?

And quickly I realized this is all the excuse we need to make a pudding episode.

Hooray!

I seconded that immediately, of course.

And then, because when it comes to pudding, I believe in going big or going home, I thought, you know, we have some great British bake-off bakers in our fan club, particularly the fabulous Tom Gillifford, and maybe they'd want to compete to make us some pudding, particularly some spotted dick.

And to our great shock and unending delight and excitement, they did.

So we had a put-off.

And there was a winner, and we're going to tell you all about it.

Okay, so this is the first trial of the first attempt at a spotted dick.

This is a Yankee spotted dick, even better.

So this is our cornmeal and New England cranberry-based dick.

No, my partner Tim is not a former bake-off contestant.

Here's what happened.

Once Nikki and I realized that the wonderful Tom Gilliford of the Great British Bake Off had indeed gathered two of his bake-off friends to compete on Gastropod, then I had a problem.

Tim either had to come with us to London or he would divorce me.

He's the baker in the family and he and I are equally obsessed with bake-off.

So we threw a rookie into the mix.

Four bakers, Yan, Tom, and Selassie from the Bake Off, Tim from Casa Gastropod.

One evening, and one challenge to create a spotted dick with a twist.

Well, a mini dick, actually.

Tom kindly pointed out that a full-size dick would take too long, so to speak.

It begins.

Spotted dick traditionally is a steamed pudding with raisins or currants in it.

It's typically served with custard poured over top.

But back in our home in Boston, Tim invented his own spotted dick recipe for the competition, a Yankee dick, and we gave his very first bake of it a try.

Mm.

Mmm.

Hmm.

Okay.

So I I think it's a little too sweet, because the cranberries are very sweet.

They're sweet, and just the dough, like the

pudding part itself is pretty sweet.

And you're going to put a custard on it, and so I agree it needs to be a little less sweet.

But the cornmeal has a really nice, crunchy texture.

So I have to say, neither of us have ever had spotted dick before, so we actually don't know how this compares.

This is the best spotted dick I've ever had.

There were a few more bakes to get the recipe just right.

Then Tim packed up his cornmeal, cranberries, rum, maple syrup, measuring cups, and whisk and zester, and he got on an overnight flight to meet us in London.

Other bakers have brought other things, like whiskey, a bottle of scotch,

not any old scotch either.

Lafroig, 10-year-old LeFroy, gotta be.

And then, because you've gotta have a drink with it, this is not in going in the pudding, it's just going next to it, which is some LeFroy infused with apricots, which is fun.

And then my knife roll, which doesn't have any knives in it today, just has like cling film and

an orangutan-shaped potato peeler that's amazing and my nitrogen siphon which i'm excited for using later on for nitrogen infused custard in case you've never played with a nitrogen siphon i have not yet had that particular joy it's how you make something foamy if you happen to be a high-tech chef or baker you use it to infuse a liquid with tiny bubbles of nitrous oxide thoma brought his own ingredients and pudding gear but he'd also done selassie's shopping rhubarb though i see as for selassie i don't know what the rhubarb's about i'm assuming he's using rhubarb because because he hasn't asked for any dried fruit.

But

I wouldn't put it past him that he gets here and he's like, where's my dried fruit?

And I'll be like, in the picture of the note that you scrolled by hand with no measurements on it and sent to me saying buy this, which was sent to me sideways.

You are his bitch.

Yeah, I am.

Selassie hadn't shown up yet on his trademark motorbike, but his ingredients were there.

And Jan went shopping for her ingredients in her pantry.

So I've chosen a steamed pudding, and for that, I'm going to make some limoncello soaked blueberries so the blueberries are dried so because the lemons and blueberries have worked really well I've used it previously in an in an episode so I know that it works

it's the it was the show that I went out on

so it's a winning it's a winning combination

it's purely because I love the flavours so and plus

dried blueberries lying in the cupboard not looking sad so I had to use them had currants, but these are more exciting, I think.

So, we've got Tim the rookie with his Yankee dick.

We've got Yan with her winning combination of lemon and blueberries.

Tom also went shopping in his cupboard for something to go with the whiskey.

I am making an apricot, pistachio, and sage spotted dick.

Then, we're putting a sage and Lafroue syrup over the top and using a Lafroig Demera Sugar nitrogenised

custard, which is going to be really light and fluffy.

It's weird stuff, but it tastes amazing.

Why these flavours?

When Nicola said, hey, would you do puddings?

I had those flavours in my cupboard.

And I was like, yeah, okay, we'll try and see what it does.

And I like sage and everything.

Sage is amazing.

Sage and whiskey goes particularly well together.

And I thought, why not?

And I don't like raisins, so.

That's Jan and Tom, but we're still missing one.

And if comments on our Facebook page are any indication, we have some bake-off fans who are also quite fond of Selassie.

I will admit, I too have a giant crush on Selassie.

But if you remember the season that Selassie and Tom were on, you probably aren't surprised to hear that Selassie showed up late.

Hey!

Sorry, I'd love to help an old lady cross.

Selassie's excuse was literally that he had to help an old lady across the road.

Selassie, even though he seemed quite chill as he whipped his helmet off, the stakes at our gastropod put-off were high for him.

When he took part in bake-off, he was a banker.

But he'd since thrown that in to train as a pastry chef in Switzerland.

In other words, he's gone pro.

But he's still the same Selassie who constantly forgot ingredients during his time in the tent.

I'm trying to keep it simple, but without the raisins, only because I forgot to include that in my recipe.

Yeah.

I'm making a simple custard for vanilla custard, then I'm going to make a, hopefully

it works.

I'm going to make a rhubarb jelly and cut into cubes and that's just going to be used for decoration.

I was going to make a crumble, like, um, but we don't have an oven, do we?

So I was going to make a speculous crumble, but yeah, sorry.

It's your fault.

We'll make do with what you have.

All the contestants had been warned this kitchen was fairly basic.

Each contestant had just one induction burner they could use for both their custards and their actual puddings.

This is better than my own kitchen.

I may well move in.

I really played up the basic nature.

I'm sorry.

I just wanted expectations to be low.

It's really how I operate.

It's totally true.

They basically described it like some cave with a whisk.

And maybe some fire.

In reality, the kitchen was quite high tech.

The lovely Sam Bompass of Bompass and Par, you'll remember him as the star of our jelly episode.

He loaned us his test kitchen for the night, along with the fabulous Danny, the Bompass and Par development chef, for which we will be eternally grateful.

But it was pretty small for the baking of four spotted dicks.

Still, everyone was in good spirits.

We poured some drinks and the bakers got right to work on their spotted dicks.

If you closed your eyes, it was kind of like the TV show.

This is just lucky being turned.

It is.

As we've said, all the bakers were riffing off the same classic British pudding, spotted dick.

But before we get to what is spotted dick, where does that name come from?

And why is it a pudding, I want to know why weren't they all baking versions of sticky toffee pudding?

I mean, just think think for a second, Cynthia.

How much more fun is it to say spotted dick repeatedly than sticky toffee pudding?

To be fair, it's not that I don't love a good sticky toffee pudding.

It's not for nothing that it's one of the most popular puddings in the UK.

It's an icon is probably the best way to describe it.

It is such a classic British pudding in terms of you will see it on everything from, you know, restaurants to pubs to microwave meals.

Everyone loves a sticky toffee pudding.

It's got that kind of indulgent yet comforting feeling.

Felicity Cloak has many claims to fame.

You will soon hear her as one of the expert tasters of our great gastropod put-off.

But more to the point, she's one of my favorite cookbook authors and recipe writers.

She does this column in The Guardian, the perfect version of everything, that is amazing.

It was her perfect sticky toffee pudding that I sent to Tim to make for Cynthia's birthday.

Successfully and totally deliciously.

So, for those of you who haven't yet had the extreme pleasure, we asked Felicity, what is a perfect sticky toffee pudding?

It's a sort of batter pudding with dates in it, so it's quite rich but still fluffy.

And then it has a really rich, buttery toffee sauce poured over the top.

And then, ideally, it's served with ice cream and custard, but you know, that is going above and beyond with the indulgence.

But the interesting thing about it is that it's not actually a British pudding at all, it's a Canadian pudding, and it's quite recent.

Wait, what?

But didn't Felicity just say that it's an iconic British dish?

So, everyone thinks that it's the kind of thing that you see in boarding school stories and Charles Dickens and stuff, and actually, it's I think it's a sort of 1920s Canadian thing.

But, you know, we're magpies, we've been stealing things from all over the world for centuries, and we're not going to stop now, apparently.

Okay, so according to Felicity, Oliver Twist would never have sat down to a sticky toffee pudding.

But I'm confused.

Who did the stealing, and why is sticky toffee pudding virtually unknown in Canada if that's where it came from?

This makes no sense.

Probably the best known origin myth is from the Sharrow Bay Hotel in the Lake District and it was quite famous in I think the 19, sort of the 1960s and it was a sort of a rare oasis of good cooking in what was at the time a little bit apparently of a culinary desert.

Like so many dishes we talk about on this show, there's an origin myth and then there's what's more likely the truth, although even that is kind of hard to figure out.

The myth is that this chef at the Sharrow Bay Hotel in Northern England, his name was Francis Coulson, he invented sticky toffee pudding.

Then there's a rival myth, the Cartmel Village Shop, just a few miles down the road from the Sharo Bay Hotel.

They claim to be the home of sticky toffee.

And you can find Cartmel Village Shop ready-made sticky toffee puds in supermarkets all over the UK.

And then still others say it was actually invented in a hotel in Aberdeenshire in Scotland.

Felicity thinks the Sharo Bay Hotel Francis Coulson theory is the closest.

But the interesting thing is that actually, if you dig a little bit deeper from these off-pedaled origin stories, you can find out that actually, I think Francis was friendly with a Canadian woman, and there's definitely been very similar puddings found that are much earlier and from Canada.

So it seems likely that he made it famous, but probably didn't invent it.

There is some evidence to back this up.

Francis Coulson apparently confessed to a fellow British chef that he borrowed the original recipe from a lovely woman in Lancashire called Patricia, or in some versions of the story, Peggy.

And apparently, she'd got the recipe, which maybe involved maple syrup rather than toffee sauce.

She'd got it from a Canadian serviceman who was stationed at her house during the Second World War.

Which sort of makes sense as an origin, so I don't know.

Unfortunately, lost in the mists of time and sort of weighed down by layers of toffee sauce is

how he got that recipe from her and you know, did he eat it at her house?

Where did it come from?

We don't know.

So the origins of sticky toffee pudding are still kind of a mystery, but it seems pretty clear it's not originally British and it's not actually a pudding.

It is an unusual pudding.

Instead, it's not this kind of standard pudding that people here would make.

It is a pudding in the sense that all all desserts in England can be called puddings, but it's not a pudding pudding, if you see what I mean.

I have no idea what you mean.

Even I was confused about what a British pudding truly was, to be honest, and I'm British.

So we went to consult the expert in Belgium.

As one does.

What a beautiful tea you've made for us here.

Well, I enjoy making an effort in tea.

My name is Regola Isabeen.

I'm from Belgium, from Flanders, the Dutch-speaking area of Belgium.

And I have written a book called Pride and Pudding and a book called The National Trust Book of Puddings about history of British puddings, savoury and sweet.

Yes, a Flemish Belgian is in fact the world's expert on British puddings.

As you might imagine, Regula is a hardcore anglophile.

So we asked her, what is a pudding?

So a pudding can be lots of different things.

It can be savoury, which is the actual mother of pudding, the alpha pudding, which is Haggis type of dishes, and sausages, black pudding, blood sausage.

That's what the mother of puddings is.

But pudding can also be sweet, and that's what it evolved to through the ages.

And today pudding is synonymous for dessert.

But while

all desserts can be pudding, not all puddings can be dessert.

Hmm.

That answer was not exactly crystal clear.

So we also asked Felicity and got pretty much the same answer.

I mean it's a really

blurred line and then diagram terms there's an awful lot of overlap.

So pudding can generally mean dessert in general.

So anything from a slice of birthday cake you can say what are we having for pudding?

It could be that or a fruit salad if you're my mum.

But also more specifically it does refer to the sort of slightly heavier, less fancy, sort of traditional pudding.

So, a really probably not a fail-safe, but quite a good rule is that if it's French or Italian, it's probably not a pudding.

It's a dessert.

But if it's, you know, British or Irish, then it probably qualifies as a pudding.

And but then, of course, you have the vexed question of stuff like black pudding and hogs pudding, which are sausages and definitely shouldn't be eaten for dessert.

So that's hard.

Haggis is also a pudding, and obviously, that contains all sorts of offal.

So there's sort of three different meanings, and I don't know how long you have to live here to figure it out.

As someone who has never lived in the UK, I literally once texted Nikki in the middle of Great British Bake Off to ask, how can there be a pudding week if all desserts are puddings?

The questions that really matter.

Brought to you by Cynthia Graper.

She was really stressed out about this.

Bakeoff is so stressful that I have to watch from behind a cushion, so I feel you.

But the key to understanding pudding is really what regular just called the mother of all puddings, haggis.

The traditional Scottish dish of meat, oatmeal, and seasoning stuffed in a stomach and boiled.

One theory is that the word pudding comes from the Latin botellis, which means sausage or small intestine.

But in general, the word describes dishes that were made by boiling stuffed animal bag-like organs like intestines or stomachs or even wombs.

And I think that pudding dishes, they come from a necessity to use up every bit of the animal, but also a necessity to how are you going to prepare things?

Because they didn't have little pots and pans and a nice stove with three hubs and all that.

They only had this animal and an open fire, and they had to prepare food.

And they had to see how can we do this without any vessels.

We talked about this before in our pots and pans episode.

Fire was used for cooking long before people had any pots and pans.

So they used the handy bags that came with the animals and they stuffed all the little smaller bits of of meat and fat that you couldn't roast into these bag-like intestines.

And hey, Presto, you have what we know as a sausage or a pudding.

Exactly, puddings and sausages are exactly the same.

It's just because we have lost track of what a pudding is, because today we think of pudding as sweet things.

There are still some sausages in the UK that are called puddings, like black pudding.

If you've ever been to a classic British restaurant, you might have eaten it.

It's made with blood, that's why it looks black, and it's usually fried.

It's got a soft texture.

It's part of a full English breakfast.

These kind of encased boiled sausages stuffed with meat and fat and herbs and maybe some grain as a filler, they're the original puddings.

And they go way back.

In Homer's Odyssey in 800 before Christ, there is the story of Homer returning home from the Battle of Troy and finding his house full of suitors to marry his wife because she thought that he had died in the battle.

And there is one paragraph where he describes that there is black pudding being made in his house.

So that's how we know that puddings have always been around.

These types of dishes were popular all over Europe, but they looked different depending on where you lived.

In Mediterranean countries, sausages had a denser, harder texture because they could be cured in the dry air.

And there's not a lot of dry air in the UK.

It's a tad bit more drizzly.

So puddings in Britain became different, softer and squidgier.

And just like the Italians and Spanish loved their cured sausages, well, we love our puddings.

Already in the seventeenth century we can clearly see that pudding was considered something really English, quintessentially English.

And that we know from a diary of a Frenchman who travelled around England, and his name was François Maximilien Misson, and he wrote, Blessed be he that invented pudding, because it is a manna that hits the palates of all sorts of people, A manna better than that of the wilderness because the people are never weary of it.

Oh, what an excellent thing is an English pudding.

To come in pudding time is as much as to say to come in the most lucky moment in the world.

And this is a Frenchman being quite lyrical about English food.

Which is not something you hear very often, to be perfectly honest.

You might have noticed that the Frenchman said it was an excellent thing to come at pudding time.

People often ate puddings at the beginning of the meal, and they were such an integral part of that meal that dinner time was literally called pudding time.

And one of the most famous pre-dinner puddings is still super popular today, Yorkshire pudding.

This is a batter that's traditionally cooked underneath the roasting joint of meat to soak up the dripping.

And the farming families, they would have the pudding before the meat, because it would fill them up and it would stretch the meat for longer and maybe even have leftovers for the next day.

Now, the really poor families, they didn't have even a pudding.

And the rich, well, of course, they had plenty of meat to go around, but they also loved a good pudding.

They jazzed up their puddings with expensive ingredients, dried fruit, and spices and herbs.

And they always perceived puddings to be sweet because they were always flavored with spices like ginger and cinnamon and they always had sweet herbs and then sometimes currants and figs and all kinds of things that sweetened before there was sugar around.

Sweet is a relative word here.

There wasn't that much honey around and there was even less sugar.

Cooks added dried fruit to their meat or fish dishes which isn't that weird?

Figs or plums or dried cherries with meat or orange peel with fish?

It's delicious.

In the past they didn't really care about the fact that fish should be savory.

They just thought what can we do with the texture of this meat and what can we make of it?

And of course because we are human, we like sweet things.

Two things happened to change the destiny of pudding and make it synonymous with dessert.

The first was sugar.

Sugar was a rare and expensive spice in the Middle Ages.

Only the rich could add it to their stuffed intestines.

And then Europeans set up plantations with slave labor in the Caribbean and Central and South America.

Sugar was still expensive, but it became more common.

And then finally, mechanization and expansion made it even cheaper in the 1800s.

That was the turning point.

So the introduction of sugar too puddings goes quite quietly for a while until it becomes relatively cheap in the 19th century.

The second thing that relegated pudding from a main course dish to its own category at the end of the meal is something we've talked about before.

The shift from dining a la Francaise, where everything was just served all at the same time, banquet style.

To dining a la rousse, which is a style where there are some dishes on the table, but then there will be footmen and they will come come and present a silver platter with some salmon, with some asparagus, and the chef has more control about how food is combined onto the plates of the dining guest.

And that is when, of course, people start thinking, like, should there be a sweet pudding on the table when we're having salmon and asparagus?

And they start finding that quite strange.

And it starts moving towards the end of the meal.

Again, like the introduction of sugar, the migration of sweet sweet things to the end of the meal was slow.

It took place over decades, with the super-rich changing their eating habits first, and the poor, well, they weren't eating multi-course meals until much later.

And as everyone starts to be able to get a hold of more sugar and they move that sweet dish to the end of the meal, they also think, hey, let's get rid of the meat in our puddings.

Meat belongs in the savory course.

These sweet puddings become pure sweet.

So they get rid of the meat in their puddings, but they keep all the dried fruit and the spices and the sugar and the grains and even the animal fat.

And the result is what we think of as British pudding today.

Puddings like spotted dick.

That smells really good.

Oh, very pretty in pink.

I like pink.

What's in it?

It's just rhubarb.

Meanwhile, back in the put-off kitchen, things were going well.

At least for some of the bakers.

Tim, I just also have to say, listeners, that you just are like, you haven't even slept all night.

Yeah, so I was on the red eye from Boston, didn't sleep a wink, and now here I am trying to pretend I know how to cook.

Tim's hands were a little shaky, I'm not gonna lie to you.

Here he was, zero sleep, ingredients, and equipment schlept across the ocean, competing against some of the very best amateur bakers in the UK.

Could he make it work, and would he forgive me if everything fell apart?

Yeah, seriously, you were potentially even more nervous than Tim, Cynthia.

Let's be honest here.

But even Jan was experiencing some baking issues.

This message is brought to you by Apple Card.

Each Apple product, like the iPhone, is thoughtfully designed by skilled designers.

The titanium Apple Cart is no different.

It's laser-etched, has no numbers, and it earns you daily cash on everything you buy, including 3% back on everything at Apple.

Apply for Apple Card on your iPhone in minutes.

Subject to credit approval, AppleCard is issued by Goldman Sachs Bank USA, Salt Lake City Branch.

Terms and more at AppleCard.com.

Support for this show comes from Pure Leaf Iced Tea.

Tea.

You know that point in the afternoon when you just hit a wall?

You don't have time for self-care rituals or getting some fresh air, so maybe you grab a beverage to bring you back.

But somehow it doesn't do the trick, or it leaves you feeling even worse.

What you need is a quality break, a tea break.

And you can do that with Pure Leaf Iced Tea, real brewed tea made in a variety of bold and refreshing flavors with just the right amount of naturally occurring caffeine.

With a Pure Leaf Iced tea in hand, you'll be left feeling refreshed and revitalized with a new motivation to take on what's next.

The next time you need to hit the reset button, grab a pure leaf iced tea.

Time for a tea break, time for a pure leaf.

So you're making two kinds of pudding now.

Showing off?

No, because this, do you know what?

I'll do the exactly the exact same thing at home.

I'll stand there going, oh, well, I'm in the kitchen now.

I've made a mess.

Might as well make it worth it.

Yan wasn't actually making two puddings to show off.

She got nervous that we were going to be sticklers about using all the traditional ingredients in a spotted dick because originally the fat for spotted dick was something called suet.

And it wasn't until I read it a bit later.

And plus, you know, when they the others put the fear of God into you and go, Oh, yeah, well, I'm not using suet, I'm not going to use Trex.

I thought,

shit, have I read the thing wrong?

Explicit, sorry,

but have I read the directions wrong?

So I quickly adapted, which I'm able to, hopefully.

Let's see, We'll see, shall we?

I was quickly able to adapt.

Yan decided to carefully cover her rear end by making four puddings total.

Two with butter, as she'd originally planned, and two with the traditional suet.

So suet is, I think, a very underrated ingredient, but interestingly, one that's clearly still popular because you will find it in almost every supermarket here, as well as the butchers.

So what it is, is it's the fat from around generally a cow, although you can get it from sheep, I believe pigs, but it's almost always beef.

And it's the fat from around the kidneys, which is a very sort of fine white fat.

So it's not like beef dripping that you might fry your chips in.

It's very, very white.

It's very sort of flaky.

Most people in the UK don't actually buy that flaky kind of suet from the butchers.

Like Felicity says, you can also get this sort of processed pellet version in the shops, which is much less beefy.

And the same company also makes a vegetarian version from palm and sunflower oil.

The point is though that cooking with suet is different from cooking with other fats like butter.

Felicity explained why suet is so particularly amazing.

It has a very high melting point so unlike butter that as soon as you put it in the oven or you start cooking it in any way it dissolves into the batter

suet stays intact for much longer and so it gives a much lighter texture to the you know the structure of the the sponge because the air holes are bigger because it's had time to form around them before they've melted.

So you get a lovely light result that it's very hard to achieve with butter or vegetable fat or anything like that.

And so I think mostly it's still used because of that.

This lightness is nice today, sure, but it would have been critical a few hundred years ago.

Baking powder was only invented in the mid-1800s.

Okay, so Jan was using suet and butter side by side.

Didn't even occur to Tim to use suet, and we wouldn't have known where to find a veg version in the US.

He went straight for butter.

Tom went traditional with suet, and Selassie, surprise, surprise, substituted treks, which is vegetable shortening, when he couldn't find suet at his corner shop.

But all of our bakers went a little bit new school when it came to what they were baking their puddings in.

No intestines here.

This is also at this point kind of old school.

By the 1700s, intestines for puddings were already on their way out.

It became a special occasion thing, like haggis for hogmanay or Scottish New Year.

But people wanted to eat pudding all year round, not just when they'd slaughtered an animal.

People had to be creative if they wanted to use something else than a bag like intestine.

So they used things like saucers from teacups and plates which they would put together and all kinds of things just because they wanted to make pudding.

I always imagine looking at an English person from that period as looking around in the kitchen like, what can I make a pudding in?

What can I make a pudding in?

The pudding cloth was the first big step forward.

With a muslin cloth you could wrap the contents of your pudding, tie it together into a bowl, and hey, presto.

And then when manufacturing got going, putting tins and pudding basins became all the rage.

I am the proud owner of a pudding basin, which you just put your pudding mix in and then tie a cloth, or more often, tinfoil, over the top with string.

Which, of course, Selassie had forgotten.

String.

Danny is Danny as your man.

String.

Or something to hold this.

Rubber band.

Tim didn't realize it should be tinfoil on top.

He just knew he had to cover his mini spotted dicks as they cooked.

So, like those 18th-century Brits, he improvised by using two differently sized muffin tins and wedging them together.

This way, his dicks would stay dry as they steamed in the water boiling at the bottom of the pot.

Steaming, like suet, is another essential element that sets pudding apart from other flour and fat and dried fruit combinations, like, say, cake.

In fact, this really is what makes a pudding a pudding, to my mind.

It has to be steamed.

It's a a very gentle form of cooking because it's obviously not in direct heat, it's in water.

And also because it's moist so even though it's got it's in the ceramic basin, the top has a sort of porous, you know, either it's wrapped in muslin or, you know, more modern people would probably use foil.

And so there is a certain amount, I think, of moisture sort of gets in at the top.

And so it's just a sort of gentler form.

It's much slower.

It will take, I think a Christmas pudding will probably take you about six or seven hours to cook in total, so it's not fast, but it does give, I think, a gentler result, and you're not going to get any browning or anything like that.

So, they quite often look slightly pallid and unappetizing, but they're always super moist and delicious.

Tim kept an eagle eye over his Yankee dicks as they cooked, because that water can boil away if you're not careful.

Steamed puddings are not the most hands-off recipe to make.

You can't just, you know, shove it in the oven and forget about it.

You have to, you know, keep an eye on it.

It's bubbling away.

It will boil dry.

As soon as you leave the room, you'll suddenly hear this hissing and go oh god the water's boiled you know out and my pan is burning someone forgot to give this memo to tom though what happened was at one point i noticed he disappeared and i wandered around the corner and found him at the sink

you're just over here doing the dishes yeah

someone's got him this is not what it's like on baco no there's a person to do the dishes who on our year we were told like basically most of her skin fell off because she would have her hands in boiling dishwater the whole time.

Yeah.

So you just kind of wave and the things disappear off your desk and they get.

And if you like, I need a new bowl, one appears for you.

It's wonderful.

That was super sweet of Tom to get going on the dishes, but then I caught up with him a few minutes later when he was back at his cookstation.

Some fun stuff going on over here.

See the steaming basket going on?

Yeah, well, I let it boil dry, so.

But that's what the smell of burning is.

That's what the smell of burning was.

It was burning pan.

Oh, lovely.

No good deed left unpunished.

But while the bakers struggled, Cynthia and I did what we do best.

We ate.

Can I try your mix?

Oh, that's delish, Yan.

Thank you.

If you taste the lemons, I forgot to put the lemon essence in.

Doesn't matter.

I put a whole lemon zest in, so that should do it.

Oh, I really want to try the yeah, can I?

What is it?

It's a batter.

Lemon taste.

Delicious, really testy.

Yum, very nice.

I want to eat more of the batter.

And then from Yan's raw pudding batter, we moved on to Tim's raw pudding batter.

I don't know if it's any good raw, but

how is it?

Is it good?

It's good.

You can taste the corn.

It's such a good texture as well.

I'm liking that.

We had to play with the milling a lot to get the texture right so it wasn't too crunchy.

So now you know why spotted dick has suet in it traditionally and why there are traditionally bits of dried fruit in it and why it's steamed.

But where in the world does that name come from?

Yes, so spotted dick is probably the coolest name for a dish ever.

It basically just means spotted dough because dick was just a word for dough.

Sorry to burst the bubble.

The spots, obviously, are the currants or limoncello-soaked blueberries if you're Yan or cranberries if you're Tim.

But spotted dick is just one of the many fun traditional British puddings.

The golden age of puddings was in the 1800s in England.

People wrote entire cookbooks on the topic and they came up with all sorts of awesome names.

Then you've got Dead Man's Arm, which is a jam roly poly.

And another name for that that is a shirt sleeve pudding so from shirt sleeve pudding it then went to dead man's arm because it looked like a gentleman's arm in a shirt sleeve and the the spiral of jam in the middle could be blood couldn't it if you haven't had a jam roly poly Well, you haven't lived.

But to help you picture this dead man's arm, it's a long cylinder pudding, traditionally wrapped in a cloth with raspberry jam rippled through it.

And it's delicious.

In Regula's book, there's Sussex Pond Pudding, Peas Pudding, War and Peace Pudding, and Plum Duff.

AKA Christmas pudding.

Which we don't have in America, but apparently it's super traditional in the UK.

Plum duff is quite a close cousin to Spotted Dick.

Because duff is a dialect word for dough and plum is a dialect word for old word for raisins.

So more dough and dried fruit, but with extra spices and darker muscovado sugar to make it more Christmassy.

Christmas pudding as a Christmas tradition is actually a surprisingly modern invention.

In the early 20th century, Britain had suffered a lot of losses in the war, and so King George set the groundwork for something called the Empire Marketing Board that would create a surge of patriotism around buying British.

And in 1925, a recipe for Christmas pudding was distributed entitled Make Your Pudding from Empire Products.

And the massive plum pudding was paraded around the streets of London.

Sometimes I'm so proud to be British.

Nikki, I still don't really get this Christmas pudding thing.

What is it, and what are your Christmas traditions around it?

So, the thing most Americans find slightly horrifying about Christmas pudding is how far in advance you make it.

You're supposed to make it on Stir-Up Sunday.

Which is, what is Stir-Up Sunday?

Yeah, so my knowledge of the Christian side of this is a little fuzzy.

I'm more on the pudding side, but it's about a month before Christmas at the start of Advent, and there's a reading that's always read on that Sunday in church that includes the line, Stir up, we beseech thee, O Lord, the wills of thy faithful people.

They would walk home and they would idyllically start making the pudding with the entire family.

That's what I imagine.

I think it's only the women who would have done it.

Okay, you go home after hearing that you're supposed to be stirred up and you start stirring up pudding.

Yes, exactly.

And you have to stir it east to west because the three kings came from the east.

It's this really, really dense mix.

It's so full of dried fruit, it's actually quite hard to stir.

And then you steam it, it's cooked, and then you wrap it up and you put it somewhere dry and cool for a month, but then you unwrap it every Sunday to feed it with brandy.

So you have a dense steamed pudding that you've kept in the pantry for a month and you've been soaking it with brandy every week.

Yum?

Yep, and then you steam it again on Christmas Day, and then you stick a sprig of holly on top for decoration, and you give it one last dousing with brandy and you set it on fire.

I have no way of actually scientifically or historically proving this, but I think the English have always loved dinner theatre, and of course, that would be quite extraordinary, wouldn't it?

If you would have your pudding with flames.

So, apparently, setting puddings on fire is something of a tradition, and Selassie decided that setting his pudding on fire would be a good idea in the Bompass and Par test kitchen as well.

What are you doing with the blowtorch?

Um, just to give that nice caramel reminder of a friend,

You're insured, aren't you, for everything?

I'm both.

Oh!

The sugar caught fire.

You don't really need the kitchen.

Wow, that was more exciting than I expected.

I have to say, doesn't pudding just sound like basically the greatest thing in the world at this point?

It has the best names, it's the fluffiest and moistest thanks to the suet and steam, and it's definitely the most dramatic dessert out there.

But other than sticky toffee pudding, which as we've told you already is not a traditional British pudding, puddings aren't so popular anymore.

They kind of lost their shine in the 20th century.

It's actually the same story we've told you before on Gastropod.

After the First World War, middle-class people no longer had domestic staff, and then as the century went on, women went out to work, and basically, no one had time to bother with a pudding that needed to be watched for six hours to make sure it didn't boil dry.

There is a little bit of a pudding revival today, but it's still not a hot dish on the dessert menu, other than, as I've heard, the dining halls in British schools, right?

Isn't that where most Brits have eaten spotted dick?

Exactly, which is why many of us have a certain nostalgic fondness for it, even if we haven't eaten it in 20 years.

Sam Bompus is exactly the same.

Oh, enormous spotted dicks aren't.

Yeah, real school dinners fair, isn't it?

Which is always delight.

It's something nostalgia, mystery, horror all intermingled in the same and comedy as well.

It's perfect, perfect British dish.

Well, here in the Bompass and Par kitchen, we are bringing pudding back.

Because our bakers made mini spotted dicks, they were ready in just a little over an hour yans were first wow yeah

oh it's a pudding smell it smell it

oh my smell it smell it

oh wow

oh lovely

and then as the bakers brought their spotted dicks out to the table our expert panel of felicity sam and danny grabbed their spoons and prepared they're factors we're determining what the best spotted dick is based on.

Sam, if you don't know how to judge a spotted dick at your.

I don't know, but

is it look, is it texture, is it feel?

Like, you know,

what makes a good dick?

What do you value in the spotted dick?

Or a mini dick, I should say.

It's a horrible wormhole, isn't it?

I was going to get excited about mouthfeel, but that's.

when you see the blushes on radio.

Everyone's like, oh, a little bit awkward now.

Everyone's sitting on really awkwardly.

We are British.

I was going to say,

not the Americans.

We have no problem.

After that initial awkwardness, our esteemed panel started off by tasting Tom's mini dicks, which had chopped dried apricot and powdered pistachios and sage and nitrogen-infused foamy LaFroy custard.

Here we go.

Okay, I'm going to dig in.

Yeah.

It's quite quite an aroma wafting up.

It's the whiskey.

Yeah, we can smell the whiskey.

Yeah, it's all pestry.

It really like rolls across the palate.

It's definitely the most complex spotter date I've ever had in my life.

But then,

probably going from

that's not very high barrier to entry.

I love like the the contrast of like the mu airy, moussey, foamy texture, really dense solid.

Are you saying the stodge?

Yeah, yeah, it's

good.

But it's what you want.

If you have a spotted dick that doesn't make you go into a coma afterwards, then

it's not the full experience.

You're right not to put too much sugar into it because actually there's so much apricot in there that actually would have been too much.

I think it's really well balanced.

And actually, it's quite...

What fat did you use in it?

Just suet.

Okay.

It's very nice and

it's like a dumpling, which I guess a steamed pudding is basically lovely.

My god, that custard is quite strong.

It was great.

If I get arrested cycling home, I will be citing you.

Next up was Yan with her butter dick and her suet dick side by side.

The suet version was the clear crowd favourite.

Yeah, I mean, that one.

That's really good.

And they're both good, but that is more of a spotted dick, obviously, more of a spotted dick.

The taste of England, that English baking, I think, right there.

This is something you can really like gnaw on and then then

hefty.

What is the taste of English baking?

What does that mean to you?

So it's like just that heavy using dried fruits along with like the rich custard yes exactly it like does yeah like that's my nan in a flavour.

I thought it was good.

Don't try anything too extraneous in there.

Don't fancy it about.

Next up was Selassie's which looked absolutely gorgeous.

It's looking good.

Presentation maximum points, I think.

Gorgeous.

It's like, if you could ever have a bouquet of spotted dicks, this is it.

As Tom pointed out, though, without any dried fruit, it was really more of a spotless dick.

That's good.

That's good.

Everyone then moved on to Tim's Yankee dick with a maple and rum custard, which I have to admit was basically the opposite of Selassie's in terms of appearance.

I think it is.

It's quite a revelation because it's probably like the beigest thing I've ever seen in my entire life.

It's like, you know, it's like you can't even describe the colour because it's sort of khaki on a plate.

But then, no, but then the taste is really good, so you know, it's flavor over presentation.

Flavor over presentation, yeah.

At this point, Cynthia and I were basically dying.

Everyone else was eating pudding, and we were holding microphones.

It was extremely painful.

But for you, dear listeners, we will do anything.

Like Nikki said, we were dying.

I wanted to dive right in, but prizes had to be awarded.

What do you reckon?

Slow down.

It's hard because they're apples and pears, isn't it?

What's it up to innovation and then like the classic, truest form of the classic?

What it brings to you, yeah.

And I

wholeheartedly love the um uh is it Tom's?

The the whiskey one.

Yeah.

I know like Kevin go back to that and back to that and back to that.

Intimidation through the glass.

We're being intimidated.

There's somebody watching over the judging here.

That intimidation, that was Selassie pressed up full body against the glass, staring at all of us.

But we pressed on.

Yeah, and also the other toss-up is presentation.

And there was some really tasty stuff going on, and the presentation was kind of like very kind of grassroots.

That's been polite.

That's right.

Rustic.

And then some of it was very elevated.

Yeah.

I think I.

If we're judging just

on the spotted dick itself,

then I think, yeah, Tom's was

the most interesting, I think, because of that, the way that it was so intensely savoury, and yet it had those apricots and the sage.

But I really liked Tim's with the cornmeal.

That was the one that made me think, I want to try making a spotted dick with another type of grain because it had a really interesting texture.

The cornmeal for me stood out like from the moment I tasted it in terms of delivery.

And it's just because it was so different and

interesting and just really good.

There was also none of that nostalgia, though.

And it was so, it was

so culturally alien in terms of what the spotted dick is.

If it wasn't presented to me and said, This is spotted dick, I wouldn't have got it.

Yeah, I might have thought it, yeah, it was a traditional Native American cake.

The blueberry spotted dicks, that was very classic, nailed it, didn't it?

Yeah,

yeah.

None of them were rubbish, that was the problem.

I'm going to controversially, I think, go with the cornmeal and stand by it.

Explain your reasoning.

Just because

I just enjoyed it the most.

The texture was so, it just didn't come across like it was a steamed pudding in any way whatsoever.

So to be able to achieve that by using some different products than the standard with the same process, it just amazed me that it was, that's what came out.

And the custard was delicious.

Even if it was a little bit like scrambled eggs.

But it was delicious.

And the presentation wasn't anything great, Herman.

Absolute zero.

Minus.

But, you know.

It's not the point of a spotted date really there.

And it's radio, not telling.

Yeah, sure, it's good.

Alright, Sam, put your steak in the ground.

Well, I might have been a little bit nobled, though, by the amount of Le Freud whiskey that was in Tom's.

It is a spirit that I have a great affection to, and I really revelled in it.

It was great.

So I have the casting to vote, unless I'm gonna go for another one completely, and I saw it.

At blinds.com, it's not just about window treatments, it's about you, your style, your space, your way.

Whether you DIY or want the pros to handle it all, you'll have the confidence of knowing it's done right.

From free expert design help to our 100% satisfaction guarantee, everything we do is made to fit your life and your windows.

Because at blinds.com, the only thing we treat better than windows is you.

Visit blinds.com now for up to 50% off with minimum purchase plus a professional measure at no cost.

Rules and restrictions apply.

Hello, Daisy speaking.

Hello, Daisy.

This is Phoebe Judge from the IRS.

Oh, bless, that does sound serious.

I wouldn't want to end up in any sort of trouble.

This September on Criminal, we've been thinking a lot about scams.

Over the next couple of weeks, we're releasing episodes about a surprising way to stop scammers.

The people you didn't know were on the other end of the line.

And we have a special bonus episode on Criminal Plus with tips to protect yourself.

Listen to Criminal wherever you get your podcasts and sign up for Criminal Plus at thisiscriminal.com/slash plus.

Now we are going to tell you who won the great gastropod put-off.

Felicity has the honor tonight of presenting the pink jelly.

It's my great pleasure and privilege tonight to announce the winner of the first annual gastropod

put-off, British edition.

And the winner is, and it was very hard, and we nearly came to fisticuffs over various custard things in there, but the winner is

bake-off silence.

Tom,

let me present you with this jelly.

Thank you.

I just don't know what to say.

This is what I've always wanted.

Finally beat Selassie.

I mean, what?

Yeah, well, it was good fun.

I enjoyed it.

Thank you all.

I wish every Friday ended like this.

It's amazing.

It's so good.

I do too, Sam.

I do too.

If I spent every Friday night of my life at a put-off, I would not be sad.

I just want to add that Tim was so thrilled to sort of come in second.

Yes, his spotted dick was pretty ugly, but he invented a new dish and held his own against all these amazing, amazing bakers who we all totally love, so we were both pretty proud.

We have his recipe and Tom's winning recipe on our website, as well as links to Felicity's perfect version of Sticky Toffee Pudding and Spotted Dick, all on our website, gastropod.com.

And I was pretty proud that such amazing bakers were willing to come out and spend a Friday evening baking with Gastropod.

Huge, huge, huge thanks to Tom Gilliford for making it happen.

He's working on a cocktail book right now, folks, so you'll be hearing more from him soon.

And thanks also to Baker stars Jan and Selassie.

We have links on our website.

Thanks once again to Sam Bompas and Danny Cheatham of Bompass and Parr.

You have our endless thanks for letting us come in and take over your test kitchen for the evening.

And thanks to Felicity Cloak as well, to all three of you for being perfect pudding tasters.

Felicity's recipes are literally perfect, and she's coming out with a new book this summer based on her very own bicycle Tour de France.

It's already on my wish list.

We have links at gastrobod.com.

I'd also like to give a special shout out to Nikki for coming up with the idea for this put-off, reaching out to Tom, and doing all sorts of crazy behind-the-scenes London work to make it come together.

Absolutely amazing.

And thanks to our incredible intern, Emily Pontecorvo, the pudding gifts are due to her magic.

Finally, thanks so much to the queen of British puddings, the Belgian author Regula Isuin.

Her book is called Pride and Pudding, and she has a new one coming out with the National Trust the summer.

We have links, of course.

And thank you, Regula, also for feeding us such delicious puddings.

When we left Regula's house, we were in fact stuffed like puddings.

It was a lovely feeling.

We have so many fabulous extras this episode, like the romantic story of custard powder, that we had to save some for our special Superfan newsletter.

So, if you can support us at that level, now's the time.

But your support at any level is essential to keeping the show going.

Thank you.