A dish with many variants: for example, mousse-like milk puddings, nowadays usually purchased in mix form at the supermarket; old-fashioned English sweet puddings, consisting of flour, eggs, suet, and perhaps fruit, dried or fresh, and meant to be steamed or boiled; and Scottish black pudding, a breakfast delicacy (if that is the word) consisting of oatmeal, spices, and blood.  As a sausage without a skin, black pudding hints at the source of the word “pudding,” which is French boudin, “sausage.”  If you travel in coastal Louisiana and order a boudin,

Source: boudinlink.com

what you’ll get is a Cajun favorite consisting of highly spiced pork and rice cooked inside a casing.  Once upon a time my family sampled boudin in the Boudin King Restaurant in Jennings, Louisiana, and when we remarked on its spiciness the waitress responded, memorably, that “if they don’t cry, they don’t buy.”  

As for “pudding,” the magisterial entry on that term in Alan Davidson’s great reference book The Oxford Companion to Food enumerates at least twenty-one varieties of pudding, including Yorkshire Pudding, Hasty Pudding, and the intriguingly named Sussex Pond Pudding, so called for the lake of melted butter incorporated into its batter.

“Pudding” is even more interesting sociolinguistically than gastronomically.  Since the nineteenth century, it has meant, in Britain, “dessert” generally—maybe cake or fruit salad or ice cream—and since the 1950s the word in this sense has been taken to be a class marker.  The British linguist Alan S. C. Ross included it in a list of terms which he regarded as “U” or upper-class, as opposed to “non-U” or non-upper-class; the non-U term for dessert, he thought, was “sweet.”  The whole U/non-U business got a publicity boost when it was discussed by the (very U) novelist Nancy Mitford, and thousands of Britons wrote letters confirming the rightness or deploring the wrongness of such pairings as

U                                             Non-U
looking-glass                           mirror
lavatory-paper                         toilet-paper
false teeth                               dentures

In Ross’s and Mitford’s view, all the terms, “pudding” included, are lexical shibboleths.  That is, their use or non-use reveals who belongs to a group and who doesn’t.

During a year-long family stay in Britain, our two daughters became intrigued by the Britishisms they heard from schoolmates, and assembled some of them into a single talismanic sentence: “Chocolate gateau for pud, Mum?  Safe!”  I have since discovered that the odd exclamation “Safe!” ( = “Cool!”, “Terrific!”) originated in South Africa and had a brief vogue in England in the 1990s.  “Gateau,” French for “cake,” has been naturalized in English since 1845.  As for “pud” for “pudding”: is the abbreviated form of the word still U?   Quite possibly, since the English upper classes have always liked slangy shortenings, “motor” for “motorcar,” “champers” for “champagne,” and so on.  But really, an American has no business adjudicating issues of U and non-U.  By definition, we are all non-U (see couple).  Or perhaps we are all hors de combat.