Oh, now that’s a whole new kettle of ball-playing worms.
A British flan is a tart.
There’s already a mixture of ingredients which could be combined into a custard soaked into the bread, and as such they create a sort of unctuous custardiness within the pudding when baked, but nobody could mistake them for the additional custard which is then poured over the top.
Redundant it ain’t.
I make Yorkshires with a much eggier batter than I would use for pancakes, but if there’s enough (there never is) then it could be let out with more milk to make something for afters. My Mother-in-Law deliberately makes too much batter, for this purpose. Mind you, her Yorkshires are largely indistinguishable from pancakes…
For American pancakes I’d use baking powder or self raising flour (which makes Yorkshires too cakey), but for pancakes (crepes) then yeah, a less eggy Yorkshire Pud batter is about the same.
IME, Americans don’t really do custard.
*Proper *blancmange is rice and shredded chicken cooked in almond milk, sprinkled with sugar. Forsooth.
But no, blancmange is closer to jello than custard, as it’s thickened with a gelling agent like gelatin, agar or carrageenan, or nowadays cornstarch, not by the setting of eggs, like flan or any other set custard crème.
Think of it as a mildly-flavoured milk jello. Maybe you’re familiar with the Italian panna cotta?
Yeah…I think that squares with what I said 
I was thinking of Italian zabaglione instead.
The BATTER for Yorkshire pudding is similar to the batter for a Dutch Baby or popover, i.e., VERY eggy, small amount of flour, poured into a hot pan, til it PUFFS up.
As a stand alone item, not likely. But it’s almost certain to be an offering on dessert bars and/or salad bars, and frequently is part of dessert offerings on menus.
I guess it shouldn’t be surprised that there’s considerable variety in what dish gets called “white eats”. A name like that doesn’t narrow things down very much…
(and some would argue that that name properly belongs to bandersnatch meat)
As long as we’re going into differences in food terminology, there’s Commonwealth biscuits versus American biscuits; as I understand it, Commonwealth biscuits are either thin and dry (like what Americans call crackers) or sweet, whereas American biscuits are a leavened quick bread similar to a scone but savory and good with a kind of gravy which I understand you Commonwealth lot also don’t really have more’s the pity for you.
Also, there’s lemonade: The lemonade Americans and Canadians think of is apparently “cloudy lemonade” which is water, lemon juice, and sugar; that is, it is not carbonated in the slightest, unlike the “clear lemonade” which is more like Sprite or 7-up and predominates in the Commonwealth.
American pudding typically is thickened with corn starch*. Blancmange in my limited experience is typically gelatin or carrageenan. Different hydrocolloid.
*Exceptions typically have the replacement in the name, e.g. rice, tapioca, bread. Some will have egg, which I would label as a custard.
ETA I see most of this was covered already. Carry on talking about food.
BBQ restaurants, and maybe only regionally.
Yeah, biscuits are crackers, cookies, all those sorts of things. Gravy is brown.
Being more well travelled, I’ve become a fan of Biscuits and Gravy, but for the sake of UK-based linguistic clarity, in our house it’s “American Biscuits in Sausagey Sauce”.
Lemonade is, as you say, something like Sprite, unless otherwise specified. It’s increasingly difficult to find Lemonade that I’ll drink though, since the introduction of the sugar tax. Sugared drinks are now legally mandated to be more expensive, so most manufacturers have elected to use artificial sweeteners in regular drinks, even if they also make a diet version. I was prepared to pay the premium, as such things are a treat for me anyway, but alas, I’ve not been given that option.
And then there’s sticky toffee pudding, the greatest of all puddings and desserts.
OP, you may want to rethink your world view.
How about:
I’ve learned that in the UK, “pudding” is another word for “dessert”, including some kinds of cake and loads of other things.
but my question to UK dopers is, have you ever had what us Americans call pudding? In my opinion, it’s one of the finest desserts.
See the difference?
And a segue into food history =) One of my favorite hobbies in fact.
OK, back in the middle ages, where ‘modern food’ more or less starts [despite similar foods in Roman or Greek classical era cuisine] there were a number of available cooking techniques available - standard roasting or grilling over coals, baking in an oven, frying on a griddle or pan, boiling in a pot. The most commonly available tended to be cooking over coals, not discussing bread baking [most small villages tended to still use a baker for bread, and if any casserolish dish was to be slow baked it went into the bakers oven after the breads were finished] and one of the most common was boiling by wrapping the food in question in cloth and hanging it along with others in the common pot - the advantage is that you could have different dishes going at the same time. A common thing to make would have been a mixture of dried fruits and flour moistened with water or milk, wrapped in a pudding cloth and tied off, dropped in and boiled for anywhere from 2 hours [small fist sized pudding] to 4, 6 or 8 hours [huge head sized puddings] and sauced with a number of things, or the dough already sweetened with honey and herbs or spices as available. Dinner puddings could be slices of leftover meats and vegetables wrapped in dough, placed in the cloth and boiled [haggis is a pudding wrapped in a sheeps stomach, regular sausage is ground meats, grains, legumes and flavorings wrapped in cleaned intestines - blood pudding is blood and flour/crumbs/oatmeal and seasonings in gut, there are as many recipes for ‘puddings’/sausage as there are tribes in the world.] If you want visuals, Townsends has a youtube channel that deals specifically with different puddings. There was a change to baking the puddings when home baking became more popular, and styles of puddings changed a bit [you can sort of think of a pasty as a pudding that ends up baked instead of boiled - meat wrapped in dough and cooked]
Now, blancmange was originally a grain such as wheat, barley or rice with a cooking liquid, dairy or nondairy milk slowcooked in a pot sitting first by the fire all day or even overnight and all day, the rendering starches in the grains being the ooze that welds the grains together. Later, shredded chicken or other poultry tended to get added, and flavorings sweet or savory as people had available. It was originally a poverty food [slow cooked grains with whatever was at hand] made regular [dairy, meat] or lent [almond milk, fish or no meat at all] and evolved into both an invalid food [slowcooked rice in milk or broth is very easy on the stomach, and egg, fish or chicken for protein is pretty neutral, cf ‘BRAT’ or ‘white’ diet] and a luxury food [whole milk, swan, saffron, long pepper, candied ginger …] and eventually into starch cooked into milk [blancmange] with gelatin for the gelling agent.
Sauces are fun - savory sauces can be as simple as gravy made of the meat juices from roasting mixed with thickening agent such as flour, arrowroot or cornstarch, custard is milk and eggs whisked together over heat to the wanted ooziness. Classic sauces could even be brandy, sugar and butter heated together [hard sauce] or combinations like that - chocolate sauce, caramel sauce, fruit conserves thinned out to pourable … and all deriven from flavoring foods externally at the table.
Mincemeat originally was just minced up whatever needed to be cooked - meat, vegetable, fruit. I have an old family recipe that calls for whatever meat is at hand and mentions pig, beef and venison as equally usable, dried fruits, extra diced lard, spices like clove, candied ginger and cinnamon … as either a dumpling style pudding or pie/tart filling. I personally love it with venison, but normally make it with beef. I have been thinking of trying TVP crumbles.
The real question is:
Have you ever had… $240 worth of pudding?
When I go to the grocery store, in the dairy case, there are always tubs of tapioca pudding right next to the tubs of rice pudding.
At the cafeterias around here, the dessert sections tend to rotate vanilla, chocolate, and banana pudding.
In the camera-monitored self-check snack sections, which have replaced some vending machines in institutional buildings, banana pudding is pretty much the standard pudding available in the self serve fridge.
Oh, dear dear. It MAY be great, but I resent it nevertheless. It’s a newcomer, an interloper. A 1970s invention which didn’t become known until much later, but which has wheedled its way into the popular consciousness as though it belongs in the canon of the old classics, like spotted dick and jam roly-poly, and suddenly everyone remembers how grandad used to say it was his favourite pudding when he was at school in the '20s.
And because everybody knows it’s a favourite, it’s automatically and unthinkingly stuck at the top of the list - like Hendrix or Bohemian Rhapsody - whenever a list is made.