Make it or fake it
Ros Thomas
The Weekend West
Published: Saturday November 16, 2013

I’d never seen a spotted dick up close before. Once as a teenager, I’d seen a picture of one while I was rifling through the miscellany of Mum’s third drawer. It was an unappetising sight even in black and white. Mum had written on the top of the cutting in capitals: “MUST TRY THIS.”

Twenty years later and here was my first spotted dick in the flesh: a cup-sized mound of tea-coloured sponge dotted with currants and swimming in a pool of custard. The waiter slid the plate in front of me with a flourish. That pudding was trying to look exotic, but to me, it was just freckly and dull.

Walking home solo from the restaurant, I wondered if some dishes are social climbers. As a nine year old, I thought mum deliberately matched her canapés to the calibre of her guests. Why else did she serve devils on horseback to the family accountant and angels on horseback to the tennis ladies?

Our long-suffering accountant got half a dozen rashers of bacon each one rolled up, stuffed with a prune and then grilled until the toothpick caught fire. The tennis ladies had their streaky bacon draped around a creamy clammy oyster. 

At gin and tonic hour after Wednesday pennants, the tennis ladies (in their fancy pom-pom socks) would arrange themselves in our loungeroom. The angels on horseback rode into the good room on a fine china platter. Keeping steed and saddle in place was a posh toothpick with a frilly top made of coloured cellophane.  

Toothpicks were central to 1980’s entertaining. Mum made nibbles I liked to call ‘traffic lights’: a red cocktail onion sitting on a cube of Coon cheese, sitting on a round of Holbrooks gherkin, all three skewered in place by a toothpick. A wooden bowl full of Counter biscuits and an ashtray kept them company.

At dinner parties, she’d serve a tableau of three peeled prawns balanced on the rim of a martini glass. A wedge of avocado lay artfully in the bottom of the glass. In the concave pit where the stone had been, Mum would dollop a dessertspoonful of mayonnaise she’d mixed with a teaspoon of tomato sauce: the required blush-pink lubricant for a Women’s Weekly prawn cocktail.

Back then, dishes were named after farmyards. Toad in the hole was a collection of sausages buried in Yorkshire pudding batter and slathered in onion gravy. At summer barbies, Mum would roll chipolatas in squares of dough and bake them until the pastry puffed up like a doona. Then she’d sashay onto the patio wearing her orange oven mitts and carrying a hot tray. She’d announce: ‘Pigs in blankets!’ We kids would throw down our table tennis bats and come running. Uncle John, who was loud and Scottish, would nudge me and point to the table: “Sausages in kilts eh! Best you try one of those!” then roar with laughter. I ate a devil on horseback instead.

I had aunties who specialised in mock chicken, mock fish and mock duck. These were dishes that offered themselves up as an animal in disguise. Sometimes I had no clue I’d been deceived. Other times, on the drive home from Aunty Pat’s in Roleystone, it only became obvious when Mum remarked: “Weren’t those chicken sandwiches delicious! Who needs a chook!”

Mock duck, however, was for pros like my great Aunt Binx. I’d watch her  stacking layers of wheat gluten, along with ginger, spices and the liberal use of some powder she called MSG. She’d then marinate her pet project in soy sauce before frying slices in hot oil. I had no idea what the inside of a duck looked like – she didn’t need to imitate taste or appearance for my benefit. But I remember being in Thailand and thinking Aunt Binx’s mock duck was as good as any quacker I ate in Bangkok.

Mock cream, however, was a travesty. I’d bite into a bakery doughnut expecting the cool richness of cream. Instead, I’d hit a blob of something thick and pasty that glued my tongue to the roof of my mouth. Mock cream couldn’t be saved even by jam.

In my teens I discovered certain dinners had mysterious origins no-one wanted to explain. After a week’s neglect in the back of the fridge, lamb chops could re-invent themselves as Wakefield chops, a casserole always prepared in secret. I was an adult before I unravelled the secret of the Wakefield chop.

 A girlfriend revealed her mum would save a dozen whiffy chops from their rightful destiny in the dustbin. She’d soak them overnight in a conglomerate of sauces (HP, Brown, Worcestershire, soy). After a few hours baking them in the oven, she’d pronounce them: “Good as new!”

Which brings me to the problem of the dozen snags I bought and forgot last Tuesday. Could I, would I inflict the Wakefield sausage on my family? No. That would be cruel. I’ll give them lamb’s fry instead.