Why 'pudding' refers to sausages and desserts 

It's called pudding because I'm pudding it in my mouth

Our word for flan here in Brazil is "pudim", usually made with sweetened condensed milk and eggs, very tasty

At the time of the divergence of the US and the UK, "pudding" was generally considered a unit of steamed flour-encased fillings, like the boiled one you made. Over in the US, the flour crust came to be strictly associated with "pie", while the "pudding" was considered to be the filling of the pie, and when filling was eaten alone without a crust, the dish was called "pudding". This is how it transitioned from being something encased in a crust, to just a stuff on it's own.

In Japan, "pudding" (プリン) is a loan word that refers to what we would call flan in the US. Most likely adopted after world war 2 when foreign industrialized food products became much more common. It's also the Japanese name for Jigglypuff

Not sure if intentional or not, but this video is just one day late for Burns Night, a day celebrated in Scotland remembering the poet who gave haggis the title 'chieftain of the pudding race'. You'll find haggis eaten regularly all year in Scotland, but on Burns night, it's a must have! Love it.

Adam defeated looks while saying the food is 'suprisingly good' made me chuckle

Australian English ‘Pudding’ usually refers to sweet boiled puddings like the one you made. They are considered an ‘old fashioned’ dessert, and normally they are eaten at Christmas. My grandma used to make them. However it can also refer to many different soft wet bready desserts.

In case it's not on your radar, there is a superb book called 'Pride and Pudding' by Regula Ysewijn which details the history of all of these 'pudding' dishes and many more besides. It is a completely wonderful book, with the bonus of exquisitely composed illustration, almost raising food photography to the level of the Dutch Golden Age Still-Lifes. Highly recommended!

Another layer of fun etymology, the Japanese have the word 'pudding' imported into their language (プリン), but this word usually refers to creme caramel or flan, not sausages or jello-style pudding

In the UK, we also have Yorkshire puddings and rice pudding, completely different to all the other kinds of pudding.

As someone who didn't grow up with English as their native language and then decided to live in the UK, this is such a helpful explaination. I always have to double check when someone is offering pudding here in the UK, as I'm used to the word exclusively referring to the sweet variety.

This is amazing. I'm from Louisiana where boudin refers to a very specific type of sausage, so the history of all these words are so interesting.

The shot of Adam tugging at the intestine while grinning is beyond cursed. I love it.

When you cut into your 1600s pudding, I totally went "Thats fruit pudding!" which is part of a traditional Scottish fry up breakfast.

My family has a tradition of making "Sweet Haggis" which is basically the Cambridge one you show here but with steel cut oats and currants. Also another one called Suet Pudding that's more like a really wet molasses and raisin cake that's boiled/steamed in a mason jar. Both delicious

Boudin HAS GOT to be origin of pudding. In Poland, the word for the type of sweet milk dessert is "budyń" and that sounds almost exactly like "boudin". The connection is obvious! That's really amazing, etymology is all kinds of fascinating :)

Adam, as someone who's really into languages and linguistics, that bit where you transitioned from "boudin" to "pudding" is basically the trick I taught myself to understand weird, seemingly-disconnected etymologies. A lot of words from different languages, sometimes even the same language are in fact the same word, just said differently...

I think you're correct when you say there wasn't a distinction between sweet and savoury foods originally. Sweet things were just put into savoury dishes because they tasted interesting, and probably made the meat and guts taste a bit less bland! It was only over the course of time that the concept of a specifically sweet pudding became a thing, but they were still made in basically the same way. Desserts like Christmas Pudding still are traditionally wrapped in cloth and steamed.

As a Filipino that grew up in the Philippines, Pudding to me refers to Bread Pudding; specifically the kind local bakeries make from yesterday's unsold stale bread. I guess the definition does work. It's crumbled bread soaked in a liquid to form a mash then set into a mold then cooked to solidify.

For me, Flan is Pudding. In Taiwan, one of the most popular desserts you can get in every convenient stores is "布丁" (Bu Ding), which comes from the word "Pudding". And the "pudding" there looks like Flan.

For those interested in old pudding/pudding cloth recipes, there's a great historical cooking channel called Townsends. They have many videos on such recipes as well as a great variety of others.

Hey Adam. I'm from Ireland, cheers for not just saying Britain or British cuisine in the video. But referring to both countries. It means a lot to be felt left out. So thanks 👍 Go raibh maith agat

I must say thank you Adam. Its wonderful how you manage to answer questions that have been in the back of my mind for so long. I love your channel. There is so much to learn ^^

I'm Portuguese and flan is literally called "flan pudding" here (pudim flan). It typically refers to crème caramel here though - check out "pudim de ovos". In Brazil they also have their very similar condensed milk puddings. Though perhaps the most famous pudding in Portugal is the Abbot of Priscos pudding, which includes bacon in its confection.

Have you talked about - or would you be interested in looking into - why "Salad" has come to mean what it does? Caesar vs chicken vs perfection vs watergate, and the like.

Cuban here, "pudin" and "flan" were two distinct dessert dishes for us. I recall thinking they were similar to one another, but we didn't really lump them as subcategories of one type.

In Poland we have a very similar sweet dessert - budyń. The word clearly comes from 'pudding', and it's also a sweet, custard-like dessert mostly made with starch instead of eggs, although traditionally it used to be cooked with eggs, wheat or millet flour, and cooked in tin cake pans (called 'budyń pans' in polish), and it looked more like cake than pudding (or modern budyń, actually). There used to be a savoury version of budyń too, prepared with vegetables, mushrooms and minced meet (mostly poultry and veal), but it's pretty much forgotten in the part of the country I live (Poland ain't small and it's quite diverse, and there are a lot of recipes still being made, so somewhere people still enjoy it, I'm sure). If you can research it a little bit, or you have a polish friend who could help you out, try out budyń - it's nice, you'll enjoy it.

In Sweden Bloodpudding is stilled called pudding, but we also have a sausage called blood sausage, and for the deserts... still pudding From Swedish Wikipedia: "In Swedish cuisine, the term often refers to dishes that are topped with egg yolks, milk and sometimes flour, and which are then baked in an oven or boiling water bath until the pudding has set. It can be salmon pudding or macaroni puddings with varying ingredients. Pudding can also refer to a sweet dessert based on a liquid, often milk, which can be boiled with potato or corn flour (starch) or gelatin, sugar and various flavorings. The pudding mass is poured into serving bowls or into a large pudding bowl, allowed to cool and harden and sometimes turned upside down. Popular flavorings include chocolate pudding, vanilla pudding and almond-flavored vanilla pudding."

In Britain, we also have other savoury puddings like steak/steak and kidney puddings as well as other rag puddings (named such because they would be made in a rag from a suet pastry wrapped around meat and other fillings).

That's "hold the door' reference was lovely. Thank you

in argentina we call the custard pudding "postrecito" which means little dessert, we call a log made with meat and whatever other things you want "budin de carne", so pudding and we also use budin for a kind of thick cake we interestingly also usually shape like a log. however we don't use casings for any of those examples.

Just as I sit down to tuck into some black pudding, this video pops up! I have always been curious about this so I'm glad you've put the effort into making this video for us Adam Also we have a pudding called clootie dumpling in Scotland that is cooked in a cloot (cloth). You can also fry slices of it the next day in a fried breakfast! I'm sure that would work with your pudding too.

That pudding you cooked reminded me a lot of the plum pudding Townsends cooked on their channel. Supposedly it was the bomb among American settlers for centuries.

The Townsends have* quite a few pudding recipe videos out there. Good mix of history in there as well. (I'll recommend them as often as I can lol)

I think it’s also important to clarify the way that the word Jell-O is used in the USA. Jell-O is a company that makes gelatin and pudding. However, when we say “Jell-O,” we’re almost exclusively talking about gelatin. (In England, I believe they use the word “jelly,” but in the USA, the word jelly is used to describe a product that’s similar to jam.) In the USA, when we use the word “pudding,” we’re always talking about a sweet, creamy substance like chocolate pudding or vanilla pudding. We don’t use the word pudding if we’re talking about gelatin.

Yes Adam! Flan for us can be considered as pudding when made from gelatin or starch. But not when made from eggs. Great video as always!

"[Haggis casing] is edible, arguably" damn i cant believe I have to disinvite Adam from Burns' Night.

6:59 Salt was just relatively expensive back then compared to now. It was a good not commonly used in regular dishes, but more in "special" ones - affordable, but still pricey

I’m from England and I knew about half of that but this was Enlightening. Thank You, I really enjoyed this video.

From what I figure from this video, it is possible that pudding referred to the method of putting stuff inside a container and cooking it. When fabric containers were common, you had people making sausaged in fabric and then removing the fabric to have a caseless sausage, not unlike the modern hotdog today. This also means that plastic containers can be used to hold the sausage in place to be removed later, as that is the pudding method of preparation. That is why certain cakes are considered puddings, and why the blood sausage you showed had no case... and why hotdogs are still considered a sausage in spite of being sold caseless. This means that Flan is literally more pudding than Jello Pudding. This is pure conjecture, though.

"let me hold the door for you" I was so confused when you first said that, but in a few seconds I got it. That was very clever.

Thank you for the explanation. Putting it in context of the transition from intestinal casing to cloth casing makes it fall into place pretty well from there.

You always got the smoothest sponsor transitions

1:17 Interestingly Polish word for pudding still comes directly from French Boudin (pl. budyń), even though we have completely different etymology for sausage (kiełbasa from proto-slavic kъlbasa)

After Forever, wondering about etymology just makes me Enter the Void and think of that Sweet Leaf.

okay, never thought I’d say this, but that sponsor is AMAZING 🥺💖

This is one of the greatest channels on RU-vid

In Spain pudding may refer to a desert where you use old bread or croissantsor any old dry stale pastry and you cook it inside a flan

8:24 "It's surprisingly good" he says as he grimaces while chewing it

the sweet vs savory comparison you made when making the boiled pudding reminded me of a Polish duck soup called Czarninya that my Bushi recently made! although it has savory stuff like duck, vinegar, vegetable broth and beef chunks, it is also made with a sweet apple butter and has prunes in it! i just think this further shows the distinction, or lack thereof in sweet vs. savory in traditional european dishes 😊

My grandma used to make a cake she called a pudding ; very wet and close to the 17th century recipe that you made. I'm glad the link is preserved!

Here in south Louisiana, we still have "boudin": it refers to a "pudding" of pork or chicken emulsified with rice and spices to create the great Cajun delicacy "Boudin"! It's also kind of chewy and almost bready, like I imagine a UK pudding might be.... Maybe pudding should refer to an emulsified protein/starch product.

Peruvian here. Flan and pudding are two different desserts. Both are pretty similar like the ones you showed. We also have "budín" that is made with bread (usually the ones that are old and hard) and is filled with raisins and covered in caramel or melted sugar. If it's the pudding related to sausages, we have relleno and huachana sausage.

Mind blown. In Portuguese, there is salsicha (hot doggish sausage) and pudim (pronounced more like “pu-djeeng“) more like a flan. Neat to see the origins of some of the etymology.

Adam ragusea, you sir are an actual gem, thank you for this glorious information.

This is so concise and informative. Great job!

American pudding is generally known in the UK as "Angel Delight" after the brand that makes it, kind of like Jello. Knock offs call it like "strawberry whip dessert" or something.

The things you do for us, Adam. Thank you.

6:00 'This is a documented historical practise', lol; that's what we used to do every year, making the good old-fashioned steam-pud for Christmas. It's almost the same; ours was made on brown sugar, though, we substituted butter for the suet (though apparently great-grandma used to use it!), and it had rum and macadamia nuts in it. Because we're from Queensland, and sugarcane and macadamias are what people grew here. It's _definitely_ a sweet dish - adding salt _and_ sugar to something was still the height of decadent luxury when _I_ was growing up - also, in order to get it the right shape and consistency, we'd tie the pudding-bag up with string and hang it with that string so the water only came half-way up the pudding. Pretty sure we did this because ours used less fat, so it was more dense. After it's cooked, you can cool and dry it by hanging it from that same string under a clean chair or something; it lasts for a few days in that condition.

Re: Flan/Pudding - in Japan we call flan purin! So yes, I would classify flan as a pud

where's @AtomicShrimp when you need him

Here in Argentina it always surprised me the "Giga pudding" japanese advertisement because when i watched it I always said: wait! that's not pudding! that's flan! The thickened with starch product that is looser than a flan we call it "Postrecito" (Postre meaning Dessert) We also have a word for Pudding: "Budín" but we only use it for a kind of sponge cake that is tall and rectangular and sometimes has filling in the middle

Here in Brazil, the word for 'flan' is 'pudim,' which is, as one may guess, pretty much equivalent to 'pudding' (and pronounced essentially the same). Jell-o pudding we might call by the brand name (I can think of Danette, which is what I would call it, but I guess it could vary).

The fact that this turned into a stealth Burns Night video was fantastic. I have always wondered about the sweet and savory pudding conundrum and the American pudding break-away.

I'm really loving your use of "Anglo Celtic Isles" ... The Irish government doesn't recognise the term "British Isles" .. so thanks Adam!!

9:40 in Japan flan is pretty popular and is called pudding （プリン）

Why I'm I getting an intense desire to listen to Larks' Tongues in Aspik because of this video? Great shirt too, Adam!

i appreciate that 4:32 is the most replayed portion of the whole video.

In Catalan language (latin-based) we have both words! Botifarra - it's a thick and tasty sausage, usually grilled or fried but can also be boiled and may or may not have blood (botifarra blanca, botifarra negra) Salsitxa - it's a thinner sausage that it's just fried When sausage is dried, then we have other names for it: llonganissa, espetec, fuet, secallona, somalla. In all cases, the meat is coarsely ground, totally the opposite of finely minced hot-dog-style sausages. Edit: Catalan has incorporated from English the word "pudding" only to refer to some desserts. Edit II: 9:55 Some types of "pudding" resemble "flam" (that's the Catalan word for it) or are flam-like, but nobody would say that "flam" is a "pudding"

8:48 nah man you need to see a doctor!

This channel is genuinely amazing. One of my favourite on the platform. I wish I could subscribe twice

To me it is very interesting how there are so many different definitions of the same word. Here in the Netherlands, I would consider most of the dessert puddings you showed as something we call 'vla'. Or just a 'toetje' (general term for dessert). What I would consider to be a pudding would only be a very specific, often dairy based, dessert which you can take from it's container and have stand on it's own without losing shape.

Answering your question, here in Brazil "pudim" aka pudding is used only to describe spanish flan. The desert you call pudding is at least where i live (Rio de Janeiro) only called as the main brand that sells it, Danette.

Can confirm here in Scotland, pudding is pretty synonymous for dessert as a course of the meal (as well being used for eg. black pudding) - so eg. I might have an slice of cake for pudding.

Thanks for the video! Please remember that the Cambridge pudding probably contained WAY more currants than you put in. The butter would hydrate them.

I've always thought that pudding refers to any liquidy mixture that is cooked or dried to make it set firmly, but not completely hard. Blood pudding, Yorkshire pudding, rice pudding, Jell-O pudding, haggis, sausage, and so on.

Greetings from Argentina! Here we use "flan" as the egg variant. But we also have a "budín" that derives from the french "boudin" as well, but it's basically some sort of kind of cake made with different stuff, flower, mixed with eggs or milk, cooked in a mold. Not much to relate to the "morcilla" (as we call the black pudding made with blood), but still the same origins

It's funny that you mention flan in this video, because I think basically the same thing happened with that word. Here in the UK, flan most often refers to a kind of egg tart that can be either savoury or sweet, sort've like a quiche, while in the US it refers to Crème caramel, those little caramel puddings. I suspect that the word flan also comes from the Norman invasion where it probably meant some kind of pie or cake, and then split off again the same way pudding did.

Thanks for making this! I’ve wanted this question answered since season one of the Great British Bake Off.

Great video. Growing up Costa Rican, I'd say that "flan" and "pudín" are essentially indistinguishable from each other. A good example would be "pudín de maíz," which a quick google search implies to follow the same recipe as its flan bretheren.

In Portuguese you have to say Pudim Flan "Flan Pudding", the word Flan alone does not mean anything so yes, we would consider it Pudding

0:50 -- Me: "Oh wow, 'pud' is what my Pennsylvannia Dutch-influenced dad used to call weiners." Adam: "'Pud' is slang for weiners." Me: "Oh wow, Adam actually went there!"

In the southern part of the US there's still liver pudding -- which is a sausage made with pork liver, grain (rice), and spices. It's similar to livermush or scrapple but usually in a casing.

You broke me with ”hold the door”… I miss that show

God I love flan! I definitely consider it a pudding personally. I would even call crême brulée a pudding.. to me it’s the consistency and creamy texture that I think of when I think of pudding.

The Italian "budello" (guts, intestines) also comes from the same word meaning sausage.. which also spawned "budino" which is Italian for "pudding" but like.. the jello kind.

LOVE that you're wearing a black sabbath shirt and talking about pudding, both from Birmingham

The 17th century pudding reminds me of the Dutch 'Poffert'. It's kinda between bread and cake. You cook it in a watertight pan boiled in water. It has dried fruit in it. You eat it with butter and sugar/syrup. And it's absolutely delicious.

He actually ended up using the topic from the last video!

In Italian we have the words "budello" which is the casing of the sausage made from the pig's intestines and comes from Latin, and budino, which is what we call a jello pudding and it has to come from French I guess? Languages and ethymologies never stop surprising me.

Mexican here. My grandmother used to cook a bread pudding ("pudín") that looked aweful but almost had a flan-like texture and sweet flavor. Then there's jericalla, that is very similar to a flan, but with a slightly crumblier consistency, almost like a crème brûlée.

I never would have made the Jell-O pudding to flan connection, mind blown 💥.

My man, there are WAYYY too many amazing allusions in your videos that are throwaway lines which are NEVER brought up in comments but they make me laugh out loud every time. Between the various “Baby, you’ve got a stew going!” And today’s “let me hold the door for you…” I guess I’m going to have to re-watch every video and look for these little Easter eggs…

8:24 "it's surprisingly good". Not exactly what your facial expressions convey at that moment 😅

To do it properly, you need properly mix the suet with the flour. The batter will set around the suet before the suet melts. This will give the pudding richness while making it spongey.

To answer the question from 9:44. Brazilian Portugues speakers would call “flan” (although prepared slightly differently) “Pudim” which is probably as close as will get to the english word Pudding.

To address that last comment about flan being pudding, in Japan they've got a dish very similar to and descended from flan that they call プリン, pronounced "purin," which is the closest you can get to "pudding" in Japanese phonology.

There are also places in Ireland that have something called red pudding. It's kinda like white pudding but its leaner and spiced more heavily.

I have been asking this question for years. Thank you so much for doing the research!

There is a cookbook from Henry VIII kitchens at Hampton Court, it mentions Rice puddings (using wild rice which occurs in Europe), they are in a sausage case and boiled.