As an English-born Australian I have the “lived experience” of navigating the differences between Australian English and British English. It is a fun place to play but sometimes the two just don’t reconcile. One of the most grating is how the English can call dessert “pudding”.
I was brought up with Christmas puddings, suet puddings and sponge puddings-my mother was adept at them. According to my mother, my grandmother had mastered the Sussex Pond Pudding the ultimate of all suet puddings.
These puddings were boiled or steamed in a basin or cloth for several hours and often served up with custard. But the earliest puddings were meat-based, boiled in an animal intestine—e.g. black pudding’s ingredients are blood, fat and grain.
But despite this clear meaning of what a pudding is, the English will have ice cream for pudding. It makes no sense to me.
In Australian and American English we call the sweet course at the end of the meal “dessert” or sometimes “the sweet” of even “afters”. And pudding is reserved for puddings.
How did this happen—puddngs?
I am going to have to simplify this a bit because this vocabulary disaster has unfolded over hundreds of years, involves foreign influences, colonialism and the British class system.
Pudding appeared in English around 1300. It originally did mean a type of sausage—an animal stomach or intestine stuffed with meat, suet, blood and seasoning. The word origin is uncertain. It may come from a Germanic root meaning ‘to swell’, related to words for a lump or belly, or from Old French boudin, meaning sausage.
By the 16th century, pudding was used for other foods boiled or steamed in a bag. By about 1670 it described the familiar mixture of flour, milk and eggs, often with fruit, boiled until firm. Other languages adopted the word from English, including French, German and Swedish.
But then synecdoche came into play—the linguistic movement in which a part can come to represent the whole. The English extended the name of the food to the course in which it was served.
How did this happen—desserts?
Dessert is French, from “desservir” meaning to clear the table. The prefix des- reverses the action of servir, to serve.
Dessert was what appeared once the main part of the meal had been cleared away–typically fruit and nuts. Thus in wealthy homes there could be both a pudding and a dessert. The pudding was part of the cooked meal and dessert came afterwards.
In the US, dessert broadened to encompass the whole sweet course. The usage also became normal in Australia.
We Australians therefore ended up with what seems tidier—dessert is the course and pudding is one of the things you might eat during it.
Pudding and class
In England, language sometimes gets caught up in the class system. Linguist Alan S. C. Ross coined the terms U and non-U in 1954 to distinguish upper-class word usage from the usage of the aspiring middle classes. The irony was that the apparently grander word was often the non-U one. Aspirational middle-class speakers could favour words that sounded more refined, while the upper classes retained plainer traditional vocabulary.
So the upper classes would hang on to what may sound like more homely old-fashioned words so as not to be mistaken for being socially aspirational.
Both my parents were from the English middle-middle-class. Their families had been farmers and factory owners until the Depression and then the Second World War pulled the carpet out from under them. My parents moved into the professional classes. But they would never have been mistaken as upper class. We had serviettes when the U word was napkin; we had a settee rather than a sofa; had a toilet rather than a lavatory; although we did still have pudding rather than dessert.
There is a wonderful inversion here. To Australian ears, dessert can sound slightly more elegant and pudding decidedly homely. In traditional British class usage, the homely word was the posher one. When your social position is secure, you don’t need your vocabulary to prove it.
Pudding in Australian
Puddings were a well-established part of the Australian cuisine, adopted from the colonial British. Norman Lindsay made one the hero of his 1918 children’s classic The Magic Pudding. Albert was an inexhaustible pudding who could change from steak-and-kidney to jam roll or apple dumpling.
I am afraid I can’t give you a definitive answer as to how Australians came to abandon pudding in preference for dessert.
But by the mid-twentieth century Australians were using both. A 1954 promo from the Sydney Morning Herald titled “WHAT’S FOR PUDDING?” goes on to talk about “REALLY new hot dessert ideas for winter” referring to “new types of light, fluffy steamed puddings, rich with fruity flavours, rhubarb meringue, apricot shortcakes and a list of many others …”
Just desserts
So my dear Englishperson, if you invite me to dinner and promise pudding, I will be expecting spotted dick, sticky date pudding or, to get me really excited, Sussex Pond Pudding. Bring out ice cream, pavlova or cheesecake and I will be disappointed. You have mismanaged my expectations.