Pudding

Pudding is one of those odd terms that seems to mean everything and anything until one wonders if the word was invented in several languages, each language giving it an entirely different meaning. I have a bunch of recipes and regularly come across more and the similarities can be hard to find: everything from a fluffy bit of whipped topping with fruit to thick custards to meat innards heading toward haggis, and back again to dense, heavy plum puddings full of suet and nus and sweetmeats all get labeled puddings by someone.

As best I can make out, they mostly have milk or eggs (often both or at least egg and a milk product like cottage cheese) and some sort of stuff to moisten or thicken or sweeten or play the role of substance. Most of them can be eaten with a spoon and some of them have to be, bordering as they do on gravy. What gets added and how much largely determines what sort of pudding it is and how likely other names exist for the same or similar dishes (flan and custard, haggis and soppes, pudding, jello, and other kinds of pudding) If you swap what's sweet and what's not, the names change but not always much else, for example rice pudding if savory becomes rice cassarole; savory pudding ca be bread pudding or something altogether less savory to think about even if it's tasty, and quickly slides into stuffing-outside-the-bird. Pudding with a crust is cream pie, but creme brulee doesn't have a crust and the difference between flan and creme caramel has more to do with milk than caramel, an ingredient in neither per most recipes. Plum pudding barely has little or no milk or eggs but seems in retrospect to be bread pudding with less bread, lots more fruit (but no plums), and to use steam in place of any inherent liquid except alcohol, but could also be the best of fruit cake and bread pudding, chopped fine and steamed soft.

Most puddings these days start in a box and have a flavor as part of the description (chocolate, banana, or coconut are popular here) and many recipes call for starting with the box mix and not ending there (vanilla or pistachio pudding with 1/4 c poppy seeds and some whipped toppings lands on out table a lot but I couldn't tell you what makes it work), we always add bananas to our banana pudding mix, and many recipes turn layers of plain old, cheap, boxed pudding into beautifully elaborate-seeming desserts out of a Victorian painting (cooks from earlier periods had more sense and used healthy ingredients like fruit and nuts, but those take more work and look less pretty and food for pleasure it all about appealing to the eyes).

Well that didn't quite go where I was heading and even as I wrote what seems the truth of it, I saw things that didn't make sense, so instead of rambling on I'll pull out the cook book and start posting some recipes and links to recipes on the theme.