When it comes to pudding, almost everyone thinks of delicious desserts that are soft, tender, and tremble with a poke of a spoon. However, on the British table, puddings are complex, diverse and extremely disruptive.
The name Pudding has appeared on the land of Britain as early as the 13th century. It is a change from the Latin Botellinus/Botellus, but it has nothing to do with this small dessert at that time, and it is still fulfilling its duties. Acting as its Latin text meaning-sausage!
Sausage is a food processing technology that is almost as old as human civilization. As early as the 8th century BC, there was a record of sausage in Homer's epic poem "Odyssey". With the continuous expansion of the Roman Empire, sausage-making techniques were brought to all parts of Europe.
There are so many kinds of sausages, it can be said that one casing can be filled with everything. In the Middle Ages, the huge sausage family gradually derives two branches: one is Sausage filled with meat and meat pieces, which is now our most common variety of sausages; the other is mainly leftovers, which is the bottom layer. Civilians provide a cheaper option. This kind of leftover sausage usually uses blood, internal organs, and sometimes even only fat, and in most cases grains are mixed to further reduce production costs.
Simple blood clots or internal organs can hardly be called delicious. With the addition of various spices, this kind of common people's food gradually becomes more valuable and becomes a highly respected delicacy in the upper class. The term Pudding, which originally refers to all sausages, was gradually solidified during this period to become synonymous with this kind of leftover sausages.
The creativity inspired by "poverty" and "hunger" has greatly enriched the types of leftover puddings, among which the most prestigious ones are black pudding and Haggis. The main raw material of black pudding is pig blood, supplemented with suet, oats, and sometimes chopped pig offal, cooked in water, sliced, and then fried and roasted. Haggis is made by mixing lamb offal with oats, onions, mutton fat, fennel and other ingredients, stuffing it into the stomach of the lamb, sewing it into a bag, pouring it into the broth and simmering for about 3 hours, and it can be served when it swells into a ball. The table is up.
With the continuous upgrading of cooking techniques, another classic pudding-white pudding, has gradually become a frequent visitor on the table. White pudding can be said to be a low-profile version of black pudding. It is made almost entirely of grains, with suet and breadcrumbs added. It is only different from black pudding with pig blood. Unlike black pudding, which has a taste of blood and offal, white pudding, which is mainly made of grains, does not have any special taste. It depends on the taste of auxiliary materials and seasonings, so it has a very rich and varied taste. The more traditional white pudding will add salty condiments such as onion, salt, pepper, thyme, and sometimes a small amount of meat or offal. The combination of grains and spices can be salty or sweet. The sweet white pudding with dried fruit and sugar is also very popular. This is probably the first step in the transformation of pudding to sweetness.
In pursuit of aesthetics, and for the repeatability and economy of raw materials, people began to look for alternatives to casings.
After continuous attempts, people use suet and noodles to make dough instead of casings, add different fillings, dried fruits, and spices to the dough to obtain different versions with different shapes and tastes, and gradually become a large family of English puddings with many varieties— -Suet Pudding Legion.
Until the second half of the 18th century, except for a few classic meat puddings, most English puddings had become desserts. The modern plum pudding was perfected during this period, and it has been completely transformed into a cake-style pudding.
Dickens described the appearance of the pudding in the novel "A Christmas Carol": "The pudding is like a large cannonball covered with specks, hard and strong, glowing in the burning brandy." Since then, plum pudding has served as Christmas. The iconic food of the festival spread around the world. Because it is often used as the last dish of a meal, pudding has gradually become synonymous with dessert.
After the 1840s, the pudding merged with the custard pudding promoted in the United States. The soft, Q-bombing custard pudding in our cognition finally came onto the stage and successfully replaced the English pudding, becoming the eyes of most people. The "genuine" pudding.
