Pudding or Dessert - which one is 'posher'?

[WhichOneIsPosher]

Sitting watching Bake Off with DH and Alison Hammond has commented in a joking way to Paul Hollywood that he calls dessert 'pudding' instead. DH and I have been debating on whether the word dessert is posher than pudding. What's your thoughts on this vital topic of discussion??

I used to work at a very posh country restaurant when I was a teen. We had a "pudding" or "sweet" trolley that we rolled out to each table to serve. Because of that experience, I reckon pudding or sweet are the posh phrases 😂

I’m not sure anyone has said that since 1940.

This is an interesting observation!
Always feels as though the middle classes are desperately trampling on each other to climb up - painful and perpetual status anxiety. I think working class and truly ‘upper class’ people generally much more comfortable with themselves (and as you say - with each other!) - give much much less of a toss..

One of my kids says pudding (puddin) one asks for dessert.

The item referred to ranges from full on cheesecake/Daim cake + cream, through chocolate bar, to 'I've no idea. Go and see what you can find'.

There’s loads of threads about Rivals in the Telly Addicts section! Enjoy 👠
(sorry about the derail)

I've honestly not heard the word sweet to describe pudding in about 40 years. Even then it was wrong.

I am a plebeian who likes to peruse a menu. I do not trust other people to make such major life decisions for me.

Pudding is posher.

In upper class households the "dessert course" was a piece of fruit eaten with a knife and fork and before the pudding course which was an actual pudding!

I'll try and find the reference.

Teachers always said pudding at school (private but not upper class). Dessert, Sweet or Afters were considered to be terribly vulgar terminology.

At my Oxford college dessert was the fruit course at the end of a formal meal.

I'm over here on my hill.

Neither - the answer is clearly Cheese.

Pudding, and I also went through the list to see how much of my grandparents had rubbed off. Both sets were very posh except darling granny who married up and was my favourite 😀

I’m from his neck of the woods too, no way did he grow up calling it pudding. Pudding is something you’d get from the chippy.

Id probably say dessert or afters.

(I’m not posh).

I hate to break it to you, but that sketch is definitely more than 40 years old 🤣

For me dessert is the little sweet bits that go with the coffee. so you have pudding, then cheese, then coffee with things like petit fours, mints, crystalized fruit, langue de chats, marrons glacee and so on....and now I am drooling..oh and don't forget the liqueurs.

I think dessert sounds posher

but apparently it’s pudding

My nanny would have said dessert lf one of my middle class friends was around for tea

Dessert - probably because it was always called pudding at home when I was growing up (middle-class northern home, DM was from working class background) whilst dessert was what it was called if you went to a restaurant (logic being restaurant must be posher than home). I still say pudding at home (therefore so do DC), and certainly dessert is just wrong for hot puddings like jam sponge, apple crumble, but I can accept it as OK for cold ones.

Pudding

Pudding. Agree with PP’s dessert is a fruit course.

Amazed by the consensus that pudding is posher. I think dessert is posher - it makes me think of French patisseries! Pudding makes me think of spotted dick and that kind of stodgy school puddings, def not posh!

Oh no. "The sweet" is frightfully non-U

it's posh to have a horror of France and the French 👍

They are petits fours

Pudding
Dessert is a formal course where fruit is eaten with knives and forks.

The main give away is the correct use of the word 'sitting' in your post!