TREACLE AND SPOTTED DICK
“If you don’t eat yer meat, you can’t have any pudding. How can you have any pudding if you don’t eat yer meat?” - Another Brick in the Wall Part II, Pink Floyd
“I hear water in the walls,” Smith says.
“You hear the treacle pudding. I’m boiling one behind your head.” He’s right. The boiling does sound like water doing something mischievous.
“Treacle? Doesn’t that mean something disgusting?”
“Close. I think it’s a sugar syrup.”
I’ve decided to try treacle and pudding. Both words I’d associated with the British, not having a real concept of what they were until I happened upon some Heinz pudding cans at the grocery store. I bought two cans: “spotted dick” and “treacle.”
(Incidentally, Heinz was one of the companies to try to institute–along with Grand Daddy Prescott Bush–a corporate coup d’etat of Roosevelt’s government. Heinz and Bush were also fascist Nazi sympathizers.)
I boil the can for 35 minutes, according to instruction. I gingerly move it out of the pan. As I open it, it makes a little “splut” noise. I turn it upside down into a bowl, and open the other side. The pudding collapses down neatly. I garnish it with whipped cream.
The grain of the pudding is like a finely baked moist cake. It’s intensely sweet, and hot. I don’t think I’ve eaten anything this sweet before.
“What do you think of this?”
“It’s nothing I would choose to eat. It’s not bad or anything. Just a little bit too sweet. Plus it’s got a horrible name. Treacle, and spotted dick.”
Smith picks up my plate after I finish.
“Oh, you’re sweet. But not as sweet as treacle.”
“Thank God. I’d get diabetes. Don’t Dick and Jane have a dog named Spot? They could have spotted Dick.”
“See Jane lick Dick.”
“Now, now. Jane speak with spotted tongue.”