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 think they are two different things.

To me a pudding can have custard as an accompaniment like apple crumble, likely to be quite stodgy and serves in winter.

Dessert is lighter and something like a pastry, cheesecake or cake.

@VitaminSubtle Not Sister Imelda but Michelle but, yes, Notions 😂

I say dessert and I'm lower working class.

I remember the grandad from Bread saying 'I want me pudding!' so it has never struck me as posh😆 I'm in NI and I reckon most of us say dessert, but I do remember older people saying sweet or afters occasionally when I was small (in the seventies.)

Pudding, to me, is something warm, like jam roly poly or sponge or rice pudding (with prunes, yum)

I love when MNers get a chance to display how very upper class they are. St Nancy of Mitford is looking down and smiling at you.

It’s funny how the simpler, more localised words (eg not stolen from French!) is a marker of upper class speech, when the upper classes would have been more highly educated and more likely to speak foreign languages, so had a wider variety of vocabulary to draw from.

Is it a form of reverse snobbery popularised by the Mitford sisters in the early twentieth century? To make it harder for wannabe middle classes to imitate the upper class?

Or is the choice of Anglo Saxon words a signal of the upper classes’ patriotism - of belonging to Britain more (hence not a whiff of distasteful foreign words like “dessert” in their day to day vocab?). Back in the 18th and early 19th century it was an upper class aristocratic trait to speak French in polite society.

I am interested in the linguistic and social history of all this!

😂 that’s savage!

It’s more a marker of social aspirationalism getting it wrong by thinking ‘I will sound U if I use the more elaborate-sounding, Frenchified word’, rather like the contemporary usage of the reflexive ‘myself’ in places where ‘me’ would be correct (‘That would be myself, Lord Sugar’). An over-correction.

The Mitforfds were barely educated. The brother was sent to Eton but I think the sisters had one of those cobbled together home educations.that a lot of upper class gels were given, some governesses and a lot of being left to their own devices.

@VitaminSubtle exactly. ‘Passed’ is now becoming mainstream (meaning died) even by those who hate it & wince when feel compelled to use (BBC etc). To not do so now feels like bad form.

’Ever so’ my Granny would wince at, ditto ‘poorly’.

My Posh friends say "pud" but then they also have supper instead of tea.

I cannot say 'passed'. I tried it once and I felt like one of those American evangelical preachers. Ick.

I know that pudding is posher, but I refuse to use it for something like sorbet. Pudding is something that sticks to your ribs and feels like a weight in your chest!
My parents were working class but said settee and living room, specs and loo, presumably in an effort not to appear 'common'. But not very successfully because desserts were 'afters', and we had serviettes, not napkins (mind you, napkins to me are the big cotton ones). It's a minefield!

Now, milk in first or after? (After!)

Pudding.

@BobbyBiscuits "Or 'sweet'. I've heard very posh people calling it the 'sweet'."

No you haven't! They weren't posh at all, whatever they told you...

Traditionally, in upper class lingo, the word "dessert" definitely existed but meant something else. It referred to sweet things that were brought from the storeroom and were not freshly prepared.

I use the word "dessert" because I detest the word "pudding." It sounds so.... puddingy.

Dessert - Wikipedia

‘Passed’ is beyond awful. I inwardly hear it in the slightly hushed, nose-wrinkling tone an older generation would use for mentioning any ailments beyond a cold. It also reminds me of someone passing a stool/kidney stone.

When my time comes, I plan to die. Anyone who describes me as having ‘passed’ will feel my ghostly ire…

I’m with your granny on ‘poorly’ and ‘ever so’.

And the AI analysis under the poem is a very good example of how you should never trust AI to do your homework for you... It absolutely misses the entire point of the poem, which is that the language used demonstrates that the speaker is not upper-class but aspirational lower class.

@VitaminSubtle with you 100 per cent :). They may add ‘sadly’ to died if they must…correctly, ofc!

@Nikitaspearlearring & others on serviette, I think it was the brill Jilly Cooper who wrote about the ‘snapkin’ phenomenon…

For those moving up from lower middle class ranks who remembered JUST in time.

@SoloSofa24 how interesting, why wide reading & discussion SO important.

@GreenTeaLikesMe is this why top restaurants have ‘dessert’ menus? For those puds that fit requirements. What does Mary Berry say?

Pudding is definitely not posher than dessert. All i can hear is Pudding said in a very Northern accent - and I'm from the North!

It's afters here,

Desert is very lower middle.

We’ll be on to HKLP next ;) Lol.