The food holiday National Chocolate Pudding Day is observed each year on June 26th. Chocolate pudding has been loved by children and adults for many years. Usually eaten as a snack or dessert, chocolate pudding is also used as a filling for chocolate creme pie.
Historically, chocolate pudding is a variation of chocolate custard, using starch as a thickener instead of eggs. The 1903 edition of Mary Harris Frazer’s Kentucky Receipt Book and the 1918 edition of Fannie Farmer’s Boston Cooking School Cook Book both have recipes for the earlier version, using both eggs and flour.
- In 1934, General Foods (Jello) introduced chocolate pudding mix as “Walter Baker’s Dessert.”
- In 1936, it was renamed “Pickle’s Pudding.”
- In Colonial America cornmeal was cheaper and more readily available, so here, Hasty Pudding was a cornmeal mush (cornmeal added to boiling water and cooked) with molasses, honey, brown sugar or maple syrup and milk.
- There are both savory and dessert versions of this dish.An example of a savory version would be a meat pudding.In the United Kingdom and some Commonwealth countries, pudding refers to rich, fairly homogeneous starch- or dairy-based desserts such as rice pudding and Christmas pudding, or, informally, any sweet dish after the main course.
- The sweet and creamy confection we know as pudding emerged in the mid-19th century when an English chemist named Alfred Bird developed an egg-free custard powder. This remarkable invention made it very easy to produce a delicious pudding with the perfect consistency.
- The word pudding is believed to come from the French boudin, originally from the Latin botellus, meaning “small sausage,” referring to encased meats used in Medieval European puddings.
- The proverb “The proof of the pudding’s in the eating” dates back to at least the 17th century.
- As part of a promotion, Healthy Choice was offering 500 frequent flyer miles to anyone who purchased 10 Healthy Choice products. David Philips recognized that if he purchased individual cups of pudding at 25 cents apiece he could easily rack up a lot of miles. He ended up with 1.25 million frequent-flyer miles for roughly $3,000. That’s the equivalent of 31 round trip tickets to Europe, or 42 tickets to Hawaii! He also donated the pudding cups to the Salvation Army and local food banks, and was able to write off the donations on his taxes.
- The word “dessert” originated from the French word desservir, meaning “to clear the table.”
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