Pudding

Pudding is a dish that can be either a dessert or a savoury course served alongside or as part of the main meal. What unites it is a mixture bound with eggs, flour or cereal, cooked by baking, steaming or boiling, and its name shifts meaning across English-speaking countries.

History

The English word pudding is recorded from the thirteenth century, when it referred to the stomach or entrails of a sheep, pig or other animal, stuffed with meat, offal, suet, oatmeal and seasonings. From this comes the idea of a food wrapped in a casing and cooked, a principle that survives in sausage-style preparations such as British black pudding and Scottish haggis. Some accounts cite a blood pudding roasted in a pig's stomach in Homer's Odyssey as one of the earliest surviving references. Medieval Arabic cookery offers a related dish, asida, a thick mass of dates or flour cooked with clarified butter, documented in a tenth-century Arabic cookbook and in a thirteenth-century Hispano-Muslim collection.

The decisive change came with the cloth. According to food historian Annie Gray, the real heyday of puddings began in the seventeenth century, when cooks started boiling them in a tied cloth rather than in an animal's gut. This made them possible at any time and brought them into the everyday diet of nearly every social class. One of the earliest recipes to call for a cloth is the Cambridge pudding of 1617. In the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, the boiled pudding was a common main course in the Royal Navy, where it used up the daily rations of flour and suet.

Over time, in the United States the word narrowed to mean a milk-based dessert with a texture close to custard, thickened with cornstarch, gelatine or tapioca. In the United Kingdom and Ireland, by contrast, it kept covering both sweet and savoury dishes. Across the Spanish-speaking world the name was adapted as budín or pudín, and each region filled it with its own ingredients.

Culture

In the United Kingdom and Ireland, pudding is also the everyday word for dessert, so asking what is for pudding means asking what sweet course comes at the end of the meal. Familiar desserts include bread pudding, rice pudding and sticky toffee pudding, while Christmas pudding and figgy pudding have a place in the festive season. On the savoury side, Yorkshire pudding, steak and kidney pudding and black pudding, a blood sausage made with pork or beef fat and a cereal, are common examples. Haggis is another well-known survivor of the original savoury tradition.

In the Spanish-speaking world, budín adapts to whatever ingredients a household has: bread pudding with butter, rice pudding, carrot or corn pudding, and the condensed-milk melkert, which needs no oven. In Spain, quesada pasiega and manjar blanco represent the pastry traditions of their regions. When served as a dessert, a pudding is often accompanied by crème anglaise, cream or caramel, which complement its soft texture. Today it coexists with the American version thickened with cornstarch, which can be made in minutes and is a familiar childhood treat in many countries.

Trivia