If I ordered something on a restaurant menu called chocolate pudding, absent any further description, I would be expecting something like an individual hot chocolate cake with a gooey centre, or maybe some fancy sort of chocolate parfait, not just cold chocolate custard - that would be chocolate custard, or chocolate blancmange.
Edit: It may be that the USA definition of ‘pudding’ is beginning to filter into our retail space - I note that a few chilled read-made custard pots are starting to use the term ‘pudding’ (this must literally have happened in the last year, as I have been watching)
I guess i saw the name, “blancmange” (which isn’t a food name I’m familiar with) and assumed it was white or pale in color.
I understand that when you say “pudding” in the UK you are describing something that is probably a dessert and almost certainly isn’t what i would call pudding. But I’m surprised that when you describe things that you expect are like the US pudding they all sound vanilla.
That’s just the context I have most often encountered - if I make vanilla custard in a video, I get confused Americans trying to tell me it’s not custard, it’s pudding.
I was an adult before I learned that pudding could refer to anything other than the gelatinous chocolate flavored dessert hawked by swell guy Bill Cosby and best eaten after a delectable skin had formed on top. Then I was offered black pudding by my English girlfriend (and future wife). I’ve been traumatized ever since.
The first time I ever heard the word “blancmange” was in the Monty Python scifi skit, when I was in college. I was not familiar with either the word or the food it refers to, so the whole last part of the skit was pretty baffling to me.
I’d probably call that a chocolate cake, or something with the word cake in it. I notice the text says “sponge”, which I’d probably translate into “cake”. And of course there is nothing pudding-like about that dish at all, in American parlance.
I just googled blancmange, and i think it’s a dish i don’t have a name for. It sounds like it’s often thickened with gelatin or carrageenan, so that make it not a proper pudding. I’d probably describe it by its primary flavors and say it was a molded dessert. But it’s basically an unfamiliar thing to me. (Unlike your chocolate pudding, which is familiar if not a standard dessert, and clearly a kind of cake.)
See? That rock looks like the inside of a sausage. How did blood sausage and lard sausage end up getting called “puddings”? Even in England, those can’t possibly be considered desserts.
We’re quite partial to tapioca pudding, commonly called just “tapioca.” I don’t recall ever seeing chocolate tapioca. You could probably add cocoa powder to tapioca, but why bother when typical tapioca is so good?
Sausage was the original ‘pudding’ - the word is a corruption of boudin - the Anglo-Norman word for a sausage in natural casing, stuffed with blood and/or offal and boiled.
The real question is how did jellified flavoured milk end up getting called ‘puddings’.
It’s interesting that blancmange now refers to a pudding when it started out as a chicken and rice dish. I mean, I know how it happened, but it is interesting nonetheless.
Indian pudding is mostly a northeast thing, I think. It is scalded milk with a surprisingly small amount of cornmeal thrown in it, flavored with molasses and some vanilla, and baked in a slow oven for, like, forever. It’s brown and dense and grainy - I make a batch every Fall; very much a seasonal thing. Best eaten warm with vanilla ice cream on top.
Frozen pudding is an ice cream flavor, now getting hard to find, and only in ice cream parlors. It has chunks of candied fruit in it. I also recall it as having an alcoholic tinge to it, like bourbon, but last time I found it that was missing. Of course it has no pudding content by anyone’s definition.
Blancmange, in its Persian origins, was that way before it became convalescent food in the West. Although it isn’t what i’d call ‘bland’ - it was quite sweet.
But I’m surprised that when you describe things that you expect are like the US pudding they all sound vanilla.