Duff

Duff a steamed pudding containing fruit, especially raisins as in ‘plum duff’.

On both sides of the Atlantic plum duff began as something very plain and unpretentious. For example in a chapter devoted partly to ‘fluff-duffs’ Adams (1952) records complaints by cowboys that the cook ‘jes’ bogged down a few raisins in dough an’ called ’er puddin’. And in England a duff was for long counted as a cheap and filling item which would appear frequently in school or other institutional menus, especially for sailors. When Mayhew reported on London street foods in 1861, there were six vendors still hawking hot duff shaped either as a pudding or in ‘roly poly’ form: ‘Hot pudding used to be [20 or 30 years earlier] of much more extensive sale.’ However, plum duff can claim one illustrious relation, namely christmas pudding, of which the ancestral manifestation was little more than dough and dried fruits.