Huh. I thought it was an alternate form of “frozen custard”, which is just a name for soft serve ice cream. But i didn’t know if I’d ever heard of “frozen pudding” prior to this thread.
The rice and chicken dish was sweet? What was the sweetener?
They’re supposed to be a little different - frozen custard has egg yolks and soft serve ice cream has more air whipped into in. But whether it’s a noticeable difference is another story.
I thought that technically, frozen custard was a soft serve ice cream with egg yolk. But i also think a lot of people use the words interchangeably.
There’s also rennet pudding. Might more appropriately be called cheese.
I heard of blancmange from Monty Python too. Someone told me what it was at the time. Probably this thread is the first I’ve heard of it again.
We always called that junket when I was a kid. I’ve never heard the term “rennet pudding”.
Well, you are certainly right that the original meaning was sausage, and by extension, bits of stuff all mashed together. So blood pudding, and puddingstone, and plum pudding are all pretty close to that.
But it’s just as odd that it became a name for cakes and desserts in general as that it became a name specifically for a smooth, starch-thickened, sweetened milk dish.
etymology is weird. 
Sugar.
Ah, boudin. It never occurred to me to make a connection. There’s a couple famous sausages (for some values of famous – us foodies and Cajun cooking connosieurs know it) called boudin, after the French. There’s a few different varieties, with or without blood.
Oh wow, what was the source of the sugar?
I think of sugar these days as coming from corn (modern), sugarcane, sugar beets, and maybe maple sap. But i hadn’t thought those crops were common in medieval Europe.
Sugarcane.
By the 9th-10th centuries, it was being grown in Cyprus, Sicily and Al’andalus (Spain/Portugal).
“Common” is relative. Sugar was not exactly rare, but it was expensive, being imported into Western Europe. So it was used in fairly small amounts by all but the wealthiest.
Thanks. For some reason i thought it was a new world plant. Ignorance fought.
Blancmange; French meaning “white eat”. Have some today.
Junket with a capital J was a brand of rennet pudding, once sold as a mix in many flavors. You can still buy Junket brand rennet tablets. They also sell something called Danish Dessert, which looks like cheesecake on the package. But the Junket dessert was a powder that you cooked in milk and it made a custard-like glop, thanks to the digestive enzyme obtained from cow stomachs.
Probably because its cultivation really boomed with the sugar-centric slave economy of the Triangle Trade.
But that was just the end-point of a slave-centric agriculture model that started with Cyprus and really picked up with Hispanic colonization in the Atlantic islands. All of that predates the discovery of the New World.
Whereas junket with a lower-case j was a generic medieval curd dish.
No doubt. That’s certainly something that gets a lot of play in US history classes, at least up in New England, where i went to school.
There’s even a show tune:
It still means that.
Wikipedia entry for junket
I’m amused that the article both calls it “jellied” and also that it’s a kind of pudding.
Also, see the history section. It’s been a generic name for that dish for ages. The oldest reference given is 1460, and I’m pretty sure that predates the modern brand of rennet.
Popovers are pretty much the same as Yorkshire pudding.
I distinguish Yorkshire pudding from popovers based on the fat. I thought Yorkshire pudding was made with beef tallow. Is it more general?
I should correct that to say that the packaged rennet custard marketed in the US was spelled with a stylish small j.
