The British Pudding Course

From the book, “What have we here?”

A British silver-plate, “double decker” pudding set, with 6 pudding spoons, 6 pudding forks, a serving spoon and a serving fork. - The “pudding course” is the British equivalent of the American “dessert course” or “French sweets” course.

The two meanings of "pudding":

"Pudding" can refer generically to the sweet, final course of a meal, what Americans know as "dessert." (Because it's the UK, this has class implications. Nancy Mitford, in a famous essay comparing the speech of upper-class Britons with everyone else, categorized "pudding" as used by the elite and "sweet" as used by the proletariat)

But a pudding can also be a specific dish and a British pudding still isn't the same as an American one. American puddings are closer to what the Brits would call "custard."

A British pudding is a dish, savory or sweet, that's cooked by being boiled or steamed in something: a dish, a piece of cloth, or even animal intestine. The earliest puddings, in this sense of the word, were sausages; black pudding, a type of sausage made with pig's blood, is sometimes included in a traditional English breakfast.

Other puddings are sweet, such as "spotted dick" - a sort of steamed cake with currants that's barely sweet and, like many puddings, flavored with suet, or beef fat, rather than butterJam roly- poly, or roly-poly pudding, is traditionally steamed; it consists of a pastry made with suet, spread with jam, and rolled up.

And just to make things a bit more confusing, some dishes are referred to as "puddings" that are sometimes baked but formerly were boiled or steamed. The best example is sticky toffee pudding, a date cake with caramel sauce that's traditionally steamed but is now often baked. (It also might originally be Canadian, not British) - From Libby Nelson on Vox

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