pudding (pud’ing) n. 1 a sweet dish, usu. cooked and usu. made with flour, eggs, milk etc. 2 a savoury dish, usu. meat with pasty or batter etc. 3 the dessert course of a meal. 4 a skin or intestine stuffed with minced meat etc., a large sausage. ~ Cassell’s English Dictionary, published 2000, pg 1000
Pudding is an English word, and we speak English, at least theoretically.
Yes, Webster’s New World College dictionary reflects basically the same definition, but the common usage order is different, with the #4 definition rising to #1 in the U.S. dictionary. What? Who in this country would agree with Webster’s in this case? If it’s you, please let me know what state/region you call home, because I’m gobsmacked. But back to topic.
My limited experience attained by infrequent visits to the UK have convinced me that a wise person attempting to dine across the pond would follow this protocol:
- Read the menu to select promising options.
- Confirm with the waitstaff whether the dish is sweet or savory (savoury 🙄).
- Ask the waitstaff to explain the ingredients and the preparation method, assuming the answer isn’t intuitively obvious.
You say you think this is overkill? Have you been there? I love visiting all the British isles, but experience has taught me that things are not always what they seem. How did this happen? Why do two countries who kinda, sorta speak the same language have so many discrepancies in meaning?
Can you identify the images? There are cookies, chips, crisps, puddings, blood pudding, and biscuits. Or is it the reverse?
How did we lose alignment?
There is a sizable list of words that might be understood one way by the colonists and another way by the Brits. We’ll just hit a few. The first is pudding. According to an article in the Chowhound site, the word pudding has very deep roots, perhaps reaching back to Latin usage. Back then, pudding had more of a sausage meaning and not so much the dessert side. Once Europeans came to this continent, the crops were different, and recipes from the Old World couldn’t be replicated. Since the vegetables available were sweet potatoes and corn (according to Chowhound), the resulting dish would have been sweet and thick. Maybe they just used a familiar name for a dish with a known consistency.
Why do the British often refer to dessert as pudding? GB Mag says it’s all due to class distinctions. Centuries ago, pudding was considered something rustic and consumed by the lower class. Dessert, however, was more sophisticated, perhaps a soufflé or other international sweet dishes.
On to biscuits. Here’s where spelling matters, Nathan. As long ago as 1708 there were dictionaries, and even then they could add confusion to ignorance. On the StackExchange site, we see three different dictionaries of that era that have three different terms: Biscotin, (F.) a sort of Confection made of fine Flower, the Whites of Eggs, Powder-Sugar, &c., OR A Bisket, a sort of Bread, and Bisket, Biscuit, or Bisquet (S.) commonly understood of small cakes made by the confectioners, of fine flower (sic), eggs, sugar, &c. also the bread carried to sea, is called sea biscuit. As you can see, the spellings are similar and the pronunciation likely is (or was), too. Easy to confuse the terms.
Then there are chips. Or crisps. There appears to be a logical reason for this aberration, according to Laughing Squid. As its story goes, WWI soldiers first tasted what we know as French fries in a French-speaking area of Belgium. “Our” potato chips were first tasted in New York when a customer complained that her fries were too thick. The owner created “chips” off the potatoes for what Lays produces so magnificently now. Back in Britain, they called them crisps because they had already given the name of chips to fried potatoes. At least there’s a thread to pull there.
Pudding, biscuits, and chips aren't the only complication.
These three foods are but the tip of the iceberg, however. Speaking of, if you ask for a salad, you may get broccoli or you may get an assortment of greens. It may be delicious, but it may not be what you expect. Speaking of the unexpected, blood pudding is not a cute name for a dark dessert, but rather sausage made (usually) with pork, pork blood, spices and some sort of grain – maybe oatmeal. This detail is from Britannica.
Along that line, the full English breakfast will not include grits, potatoes or biscuits, but rather grilled tomatoes, beans, and mushrooms as sides. Then there’s the beef. Cattle are often grass-fed in the UK, rather than munching on the corn and soy they’ll likely get in the U.S., and that changes the flavor. Also, if you order steak, designate the desired cut. Yes, you would do that here in the U.S., but it isn’t likely you’ll be sitting in a chain restaurant (steakhouse variety) with a familiar menu. The words you see may not mean what you think they do. Last thing–if you order any type of bread, you must be specific about what you imagine the server will deliver. I’d say that’s good advice no matter what you’re ordering.
Please understand that I love visiting the UK. The history is miles longer than ours; the villages always appear to be ready for company; the hot tea and the scones are superb. But the language (ours??) is a challenge. Whenever I go, I manage my expectations. It’s the key to happiness.
I was very lucky to have had the opportunity to manage a manufacturing operation of over 1000 employees in Abingdon, England, for 3 years. As stepping stones to this assignment, I had managed a number of plants before. My company knew me. I was a bull in a china shop in the US and a whole herd in a more sophisticated European country. Corporate HR arranged for me to go through cultural training for 2 weeks as a prerequisite to this assignment. Back to Gayle’s point, the text for this course was “two countries separated by a common language.”
The differences are significant and food is only a start.
Then there’s the subject of English translations in other countries. A notable example is when we ordered a pizza with sausage on it from an English-translated menu in Italy, and the pizza was presented to us with hot dog slices on it!
Ouch. I like a hot dog as well as anyone, but I don’t expect to see it on a pizza. In fairness, though, it IS a type of sausage. It can be really hard to know what the menu creator was thinking, and it must be quite difficult for translators when they aren’t dealing with languages they use everyday.