pudding

Looking up the history of the word pudding reminded me that most people don’t use it the way I do. This will be a particularly unappetizing entry.

To me, an American, pudding is a dessert that tastes like chocolate or butterscotch. The term first arrived in English in the fourteenth century, meaning “a kind of sausage: the stomach or one of the entrails of a pig, sheep. Etc., stuffed with minced meat, suet, blood and seasoning, boiled and kept till needed.” Etymonline surmises that it could come from the West Germanic word part *pud-, meaning “to swell” and the source of the Old English puduc, meaning “wen,” which I had to look up to learn is a type of boil or cyst. (I told you this wasn’t an appetizing adventure.) It also connects *pud- with the English dialectical pod, “belly,” and perhaps pudgy.

However, pudding might also be related to the Old French boudin, “sausage,” a similarity I’ve never thought of before. Today, boudin can refer either a blood sausage prepared in France and thereabouts or a Louisiana sausage made from rice and ground pork or crawfish. According to some sources, boudin goes back to the Latin botellus, “sausage.” Wikipedia, for what it’s worth, says that the history of boudin is less clear but also that the connection between boudin and pudding is probable, citing the OED. Merriam-Webster just leaves the etymology at two simple words, “Middle English,” and nothing more.

So how did sausage boiled in intestines come to share a name with a desert? Etymonline sums up that use of the term as “dish consisting of flour, milk, eggs, etc., originally boiled in a bag until semi-hard, often enriched with raisins or other fruit,” and said it was in use by 1670, “from extension to other foods boiled or steamed in a bag or sack,” and that pudding-pie “as a type of pastry, especially one with meat baked in it” goes back to the 1590s.