Duff a steamed pudding containing fruit, especially raisins as in ‘plum duff’.
It is hard to know how to pronounce the word dough, since it might be thought to rhyme with enough or rough. It seems to have been for this reason that the pronunciation ‘duff’ emerged in the north of England, and then became a term in its own right, having the basic meaning of dough but usually with reference to a steamed pudding made with dough.
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.
