My dad sometimes buys hominy so he can have hominy and puddin’.
Pudding is not to be confused with scrapple.
I prefer sweet pudding and make tapioca, or rice or chocolate pudding from scratch. I’ve been considering making butterscotch pudding, but that seems like a lot of work.
Corporations trying to flog some inferior starchy crap off as “instant pudding”? As you say in the OP, not everybody would agree those qualify as pudding or even custard.
I will make rice pudding with milk, though…
Pudding is not to be confused with scrapple.https://youtu.be/0lr9K-Yhh8k
That’s what we used when I was a kid as well. However, my mother was a biochemist and she had to explain all the details and refer to it as rennet even though it came in that familiar package. I’m sure you can buy generically labeled rennet but Junket was the only form I’ve ever seen.
That’s one of the possible etymologies per my link.
Either way, the meaning of “a dish consisting of flour, milk, eggs, etc., originally boiled in a bag until semi-hard, often enriched with raisins or other fruit” had emerged by 1670
There’s a site called The Sifter which is a database of historic cookbooks, with web search. I tried to find the earliest cookbook mentioning pudding - there’s a poem about hasty pudding which goes back at least to 1838. I got distracted by the undated book “May Byron’s Pudding Book”, which starts like this:
If there be in all this world a dish peculiarly, notoriously, and one may say exclusively British, it is the Pudding. Other countries have other concoctions, with which they endeavour to replace this precious desideratum of England: sweet dishes rich and indigestible, light and ethereal, solid and fruity, or creamy and succulent; but they are not puddings. Moreover, the British pudding is marvellously wide in its range. It gives the name to preparations so far apart as the plain and humble tapioca pudding of the nursery and the gorgeous Christmas plum pudding boasting a dozen luscious ingredients. It may be boiled, it may be baked, it may be first one and then the other; it may be fried, it may be steamed, or oven-steamed (this last is an excellent plan to which I desire to call special attention); it may employ substi- tutes, not exactly of the authentic linear Pudding ancestry, but collateral branches, so to speak, such as pancakes, omelets, and fritters. It may be served piping hot, like apple-pudding; or cold, like cornflour blancmange; or iced, like the sumptuous Nesselrode. In any case, it is, or should be, a wholesome and nutritious compound, containing, as a rule, farinaceous matter, sugar, fat in some form, very often fruit fresh or dried, commonly eggs, frequently milk or cream, always a little salt, and usually a selection of those spices for whose sweet sake our merchant-ships origin- ally voyaged out to the East Indies.
Yeah, me, too. Although the instant variety are o.k., I think the cooked versions are superior.
That was something my friends and I used a lot in elementary school. So, mid to late 50s. You must be a youngun.
Isn’t blancmange made with gelatin? Pudding in the US never (to my knowledge) would use gelatin. It’s more like panna cotta?
Me, too! But the blancmange playing opposite the Python player looked like a gelatin mold, so that’s my impression of blancmange. Other than it sounds like a disease a white dog would have.
And pictures of blancmange don’t look anything like an American pudding. It looks tidy and molded. That’s not pudding.
You may want to search for puddyng instead, that’s how it’s spelled in Harleian Manuscript 279 (or, also, poddyng), which has recipes for Puddyng of purpaysse and Puddyng of Capoun necke and Puddyng de Swan necke
Usually it’s cornstarch.
It doesn’t have to be, it can just be in a bowl, same as US pudding. But it usually is moulded, similar to jelly, and that would be my expectation. That’s why I said pudding is more like Angel Delight, or a thick custard like crème pât. Not free-standing consistency.
Although, to me, the default custard is the thinner pouring kind, like crème anglaise or Bird’s - the sauce for the pudding, not the pudding itself.
Didn’t find anything. May not go back that far in what cookbooks they have.
I looked up the recipe, and gelatine was usually first in the list of thickeners. So. Milk jello. 
I would usually call that creme anglaise or custard sauce, but i recognize it as a type of custard.
Yup. I may be younger than you but don’t tell me to get off your lawn cuz I’m busy yelling at 50 somethings to get off my lawn. Didn’t see Barney saying it until the re-runs in the early 60s. I Love Lucy is the only TV show I remember from the 50s. Never heard the expression in real life.
I just know that if it sits out too long it becomes off-putting.
Currently we are inundated with blueberries and black raspberries. Last night my gf made a berry cobbler. Not a pie, but sort of?
As any geometer knows, pi r round, but cobbler r square.
Dessert types https://imgur.com/gallery/Z5d017f
Dagnabbit, I wanted that to show the image
Is there a transatlantic difference in the cultural tendency to want a named thing to have a precise or specific definition.
I ask because:
Am I right in perceiving a general difference in the desired level of precision on opposite sides of the pond, or are these just three examples that don’t represent the larger picture?
You can make your own version of this today by mixing the right proportions of instant pudding with dried milk. I used to make these up for my lunch box at work.