Plum-duff, also known as spotted dick, is a plum-free dessert, as is plum-pudding. These dishes have such incongruous names probably because plums were originally included in their recipes, but were eventually replaced by currants and raisins. Although it may seem strange that the dishes were not renamed to reflect their changed ingredients, a long-established name will often persist even when the thing it refers to undergoes a radical transformation: we still speak of “dialling” the phone, for example, even though the rotating disk that served as the original phone dial has been replaced by a keypad. The duff of plum duff, incidentally, originated in northern England as a dialect pronunciation of dough, a rather sensible pronunciation considering the existence of words like enough, tough, and rough.