Since this seems to be a bit past the time for puddings in the British Empire (or is it just England?), I am somewhat curious. In America, we have this stuff made with milk, cornstarch, and flavorings (usually chocolate, vanilla, ot butterscotch) called “pudding”. This American dessert food is clearly not what springs to a Brit’s mind when he thinks of the same word.[list=1][li]Just what constitutes a non-American pudding,[/li]
and,
[li]Why do both foods share the same terminology yet resemble each other so little?[/list=1][/li]
~~Baloo
Vague answer - “pudding” originally referred to a meat thingy, and I think there is a correlation with an old German word for sausage. Somewhere along the line, what with having recipes involving both meat and fruit (and spices), “pudding” came to mean a dessert as well. Well, as I said, a vague answer, I’m afraid, but you might be able to find some explanation if you look at it from the historical angle. (Your cornstarch pudding sounds like what I would call custard.)
As mentioned above, there is also the sausage form as well. The British example would be “Black Pudding”. I would tend to think that the pudding reference is to the binding agents used to make them.
I would say that custards usually employ eggs to bind them. Our traditional American dessert puddings are just that, a sweet pudding.
Without researching it, I would venture that the word “wart” is from a shared ancestry of the brewing term “wort”, which also refers to a mass of grain.
By the tine they get back to Old High German, yes, the words are related, but in the way the dictionary gave it as a meaning here, it has to mean the verruca sort of thing, rather than the plants, or the brewing term, otherwise the dictionary would have spelled it “wort”. Pity, as the latter version has the benefit of not sounding revolting when applied to foodstuffs.
