Pease pudding hot…
Saturday 9 November marks British Pudding Day. It’s at the weekend, giving anyone who likes cooking the leisure to prepare a proper pudding.
Puddings are central to British culture. So central that we plonk them in nursery rhymes (see the heading above) and in proverbs (the proof of the pudding…), use them as insults (pudding-face, pudding-head), specify a rice type by its puddingability, and name a style of haircut after a container for puddings (think Henry V and his pudding basin haircut, a sort of fade without the fade).
Seriously, I’m not over-egging it (boom boom). For starters (not literally), imagine Christmas minus Christmas pudding. How bleak would that be? Or a full English breakfast sans black pudding. No way. And puddings are so woven into the fabric of daily life (‘Don’t over-egg the purple prose’: Editor) they have their own abbreviation: pud.
Mrs Beeton’s 1865 Dictionary of Every-Day Cooking mentions pudding 600 times (vs 425 for beef). Her August week plan for ‘plain family dinners’ has six puddings on five of the seven days: custard, baked raspberry, blackcurrant, Yorkshire, bread-and-butter and mutton.
What makes a pudding a pudding?
Even though we’re not Mrs Beeton, puddings are a bit of a moveable feast. You could have black pudding with your full English/Scottish, tuck into a steak and kidney pud for lunch, and then dine on a Yorkshire pudding filled with something for dinner, followed by a rice pudding.
Gut-busting and not exactly calorie-light, but don’t blame me: I didn’t create that ‘bill of fare’, as Mrs B. might call it.
What do we do to find out what a word means? Consult a dictionary, of course, silly!
The Collins Dictionary talks first about ‘a sweetened…dessert made in many forms and of various ingredients such as flour, milk, and eggs, with fruit, etc’. Ah, so that covers sloppy, gloopy milk puddings as diverse as rice pudding or the sago pudding (frogspawn!) I could never quite stomach at primary school.
At the other extreme of this first genre are plum pudding aka Christmas pudding, impressively dense and rib-ticklingly full of fruit, and steamed or sponge puddings (I’m starting to salivate).
The second Collins definition speaks about ‘a savoury dish, usually soft and consisting partially of pastry or batter’. So that brings under its wing puddings like steak and kidney and, at a pinch, Yorkshire pudding (of which more later).
What isn’t mentioned is that such puddings are often steamed or boiled and often include suet.
Last of all Collins, mentions ‘a sausage-like mass of seasoned minced meat, oatmeal, etc, stuffed into a prepared skin or bag and boiled’. Think white pudding (also known, especially in Scotland, as mealy pudding), yum-yum. Not so sure about the boiling bit. I don’t boil my black pudding. (Nor will I ever forget the expression on the face of the foreign guests at a B&B I once stayed in when I explained what it is.)
Pease pudding cold…
Pease pudding hot,
Pease pudding cold,
Pease pudding in the pot,
Nine days old.
Some like it hot,
Some like it cold,
Some like it in the pot,
Nine days old.
Though it’s a word I learned long ago in childhood, it was only recently that I first tasted it. A neighbour from the North-East of England, where it’s still very popular, often as a side dish, served it as such as part of a farewell buffet when she was moving house. (Incidentally, she served it cold.)
It’s made with split peas cooked into a paste and is a colourful reminder of how poorer families cooked in days gone by: in a single pot (‘one-pot meals’ avant la lettre), using legumes and grains and only rarely meat to make a pottage (the name derives from ‘pot’), which might indeed sit for several days in a way that would make people nowadays shudder. (It was in return for the proverbial ‘mess of pottage’ that Esau, utterly famished, sold his birthright to Jacob in The Book of Genesis (Geneva Bible 1560).)
The proof of the pudding
Puddings lend their solidity and weight to phrases proverbial and slangy. The proof of the pudding is in the eating goes back to the early seventeenth century. ‘Proof’ here originally meant ‘testing’, so the meaning of the phrase was ‘putting something into practice will show whether it works’. Over time, though, that meaning’s changed, and if you use the proof of the pudding on its own you imply that something has actually been proved as true. And that phrase in turn has given rise to a sort of eggcorn idiom: the proof is in the pudding!
If you over-egg the pudding, you spoil some story or action by overdoing things. I suppose the idea is that too many eggs in certain puddings spoil them. It’s intriguing that an early citation of the phrase notes, ‘as the Yorkshire farmers say’. Could it be they were talking about not putting too many eggs, a key ingredient, into a Yorkshire pudding?
In a now dated slangy and jocular phrase, being in the pudding club means being pregnant, and a pudding-head is a fool. And if you want to be rude about someone who’s overweight, you might call them a ‘pudding’.
Your just desserts
A further Collins definition talks about pudding meaning the dessert course in British English. Once upon a time the choice of the word pudding in the UK was a clear marker of social status. In the early 1950s there was public debate – which now seems absurd – about how certain words distinguished the aristocracy from the plebs. The first group used ‘U’ language, the second ‘non-U’. For instance, (table) napkin was U, serviette, non-U. Similarly, pudding was U, sweet was non-U. Though people often talk about dessert these days, I understand that pudding is still preferred by the poshos and in certain gentlemen’s clubs. And by moi, of course.
And talking of desserts, the original phrase was to get your just deserts, NOT ‘desserts’. Desert is the noun from to deserve, i.e. what you deserve – and you stress the second syllable, in contrast to the arid landscape desert. However, a recent poll on X showed that most people incorrectly write the word with two esses, and had no idea that desert even exists.
Georgie Porgie pudding and pie
Let’s finish with another rhyme and a (metaphorical) footnote about Yorkshire pudding.
Georgie Porgie,
Pudding and pie,
Kissed the girls and made them cry;
When the boys came out to play,
Georgie Porgie ran away.
It’s possible, that ‘Georgie Porgie’ is the massively rotund George IV, the present king’s great-great-great-grand uncle. Present at an illegal bare-knuckle fight, when one of the contestants was killed, he ‘ran away’. Plausible? Yes. True? I doubt it. It reads like one of those classic colourful origins stories we tack on to otherwise incomprehensible nursery rhymes.
I promised to footnote Yorkshire pudding, so here goes. Well, first, it was once a traditional starter, brimful with gravy to take the edge of your hunger, not a side dish to the roast. Some people still follow that tradition, I believe. Second, it can also be a pudding pudding. Apparently, cold and stuffed with whipped cream and golden syrup it makes a scrumptious dessert.
I’m salivating again.
Whichever pudding you plump for on the day – or whatever unpudding – I hope it brings you joy.
By Jeremy Butterfield
Jeremy Butterfield is the former Editor-in-Chief of Collins Dictionaries, and editor of the fourth, revised edition of Fowler’s Dictionary of Modern English Usage.
All opinions expressed on this blog are those of the individual writers, and do not necessarily reflect the opinions or policies of Collins, or its parent company, HarperCollins.
