At the end of the 17th century a French traveller, Francois Maximillien Misson, was enthralled by the quality of English puddings:
They bake them in an oven, they boil them with meat, they make them fifty several ways: blessed be he that invented pudding for it is manna that hits the plates of all sorts of people; a manna, better than that of the wilderness, because the people never weary of it. Ah, what an excellent thing is an English pudding!
Puddings had existed well before 17th century England and were common throughout Europe. Meat was encased in animal stomachs or intestines. Animal blood placed in intestines to make a sausage were common all over Europe and the French name for this (boudin) is thought to be the basis of our word ‘pudding’.
In Scotland the haggis is an example of such a pudding. But animal stomachs and intestines were only available when animals were slaughtered and were laborious to clean so eventually they were replaced by strong cotton cloth. [although not to eat! I think this needs re-phrasing]
Puddings were eaten by the wide population. While the wealthy enjoyed rich puddings of meat, or expensive dried fruit and spices, poorer households would make simple puddings of seasonal fruit found in hedgerows, which provided a cheap and very filling dessert for the family. The pudding cloth was used until the end of the 19th century, when the pudding basin was introduced.
