More than new pencil cases, name tapes, and the smell of school halls, back to school season always makes me think of proper puddings. There’s a category of pudding that seems reserved for properly old cookbooks, a handful of old-fashioned pubs, and dinner ladies. Spotted dick, cornflake tart, and jam roly poly.
Perhaps its ubiquity at school lunches accounts for its ghoulish alias: dead man’s leg or dead man’s arm. School children have a taste for the macabre, but to be fair to them when the pudding is unwrapped and before it is sliced, it does look fairly uninspiring, and not a hundred miles away from a pallid limb. This probably wasn’t helped by the fact that, before baking parchment and foil were widespread, the pudding would be steamed in a shirtsleeve. For those children for whom even these visuals aren’t sufficiently horrifying, there is Beatrix Potter’s The Tale of Samuel Whiskers or The Roly-Poly Pudding which sees Tom Kitten covered with butter and dough by the rats Samuel Whiskers and his wife Anna Maria, who plan to turn him into a roly poly, no doubt traumatising children for years to come.
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