Although you might expect spotted dick—a kind of suet pudding—to have been given its name by a man prone to whimsy or hypochondria, the name of the dish actually has a very sober origin. Since the early nineteenth century, dick referred to a cheese made in Suffolk, one of England’s many counties; the name of this cheese was originally spelt with a capital D, suggesting that it may have been derived from some now-forgotten Dick. Shortly after, the name of the cheese was borrowed as a synonym for pudding, and was often used in conjunction with other words that indicated the type of pudding. Thus, treacle dick was pudding served with a treacle sauce, while spotted dick was pudding made with currants that “spotted” the surface of the dessert. (Dick, incidentally, did not become a slang term for penis until the late nineteenth century, well after dick the pudding had established itself.) Another dish that appears to have a whimsical name is petticoat tails, a kind of butter-cake first referred to at the beginning of the nineteenth century. Like spotted dick, however, the name petticoat tails originated from what was once a straightforward name: the French petit gateau, meaning little cake, was simply corrupted by the English to the more familiar-sounding petticoat tails. Other dishes, however, have names intended from the start to be whimsical. Bubble and squeak, for example, a dish of meat and cabbage fried together, received its name in the mid eighteenth century from the sounds it emits as it cooks. Around the same time, a dish made by cooking sausages in batter came to be known as toad in the hole because of its resemblance to that zoological phenomenon. In the late nineteenth century, a more poetic resemblance led to the name angels on horseback, denoting a canape made by rolling oysters in bacon and then serving them on crisp toast. However, the name that best manages to be both whimsical and literal belongs not to a dish, but to a beverage: merry go down, a strong ale popular in the sixteenth century.