A pudding is a moist, cakey kind of thing, as opposed to something like a bavarois as in the US. They are like a steamed cake.

Chocolate pudding recipe

She probably means "possets", which are more like a US "pudding" in texture. It's a kind of flavoured and set cream:

Lemon Posset recipe

wow, thank you, colleenoz! That Lemon Posset looks like it could be wonderful!

Re the "chocolate pudding" -- that is what the cooks were tasked to make. That steamed cake would make sense to me, but none of the cooks made anything that looked like that. I recall one contestant making what looked like what I would call pudding, using white chocolate and grapefruit. Certainly nothing like that steamed cake. I'm unfamiliar with bavarois, but it appears like it might be a firmer set than what I think of as pudding.

Just for confusion, ’pudding’ also means dessert as in ”what are we having for pudding”. Maybe that‘s what was meant on the TV show.

Not all puddings are steamed. You can bake them like a cake. Nigella’s linked recipe shows the traditional shape, made in a pudding basin.

Talking of incomprehensible terms, if I see ’cups’ mentioned in a recipe I just give up. And what the heck is a ’stick’ of butter? What does it weigh?

@floral_uk z.8/9 SW UK We really should switch to weight only!

@colleenoz The lemon posset looks lovely but what is thickened cream? I've heard of clotted so guessing thinner than that but thicker than heavy cream?

I agree that 'pudding' can refer generically to any sort of dessert. But puddings can be savory as well - Yorkshire pudding, black pudding, steal and kidney pudding, etc.

A 'stick' of butter is 1/4 pound or 1/2 cup. And a cup is a volume measurement equal to 8 ounces or 250 ml.

What I find incomprehensible is anything measured via the metric system :-) Used very rarely in this country and few are familiar with it.

haha! floral, I can help with the 'sticks' :) Here, butter is generally sold as a one pound box that contains 4 "sticks" -- each stick is wrapped in a sort of waxed paper and has little marks on the paper, indicating tablespoons, to help you take the amount you need. A 'stick' is 1/2 cup, 8 tablespoons, or 1/4 pound. :)

'Cups' here are both a measure of volume (dry) and liquid. 1 cup = 16 tbs = 8 fluid oz.

eta: Should have also said that a pound is 16 oz. = 450 grams. And 8 fluid oz = 250 ml. And I hope I haven't made a stupid mistake in what I've typed! lol!

Floral...a stick of butter is 4 OZ...can't convert to grams, sadly I can't think in Metric. I finally have managed to remember thaat a Kilo is a little less than 2 pounds. But what does a stone weigh? LOL!

But I blame the Brits for all the cups and inches and fathoms...you brought them to our land and no matter how many French, Dutch, Germans, Italians and Polish we assimmilate....the cups, ounces, and inches stay.

My (un) favorite recipes are those that speak of a 10 cent can of tuna and a package of chips and a knob of butter....but I will accept a handful or raisins and a pinch of nutmeg.

An American ”stick of butter” is 1/4 pound or 1/2 cup. British pints are different from American. Our cup is a standard measure, done with a measuring cup (“jug” in Britain). It's 8 ouces in volume. According to Google, that's 236.588 ml. Our system of volume measures dates from before most people had kitchen scales, in an agrarian society, but most home cooks/bakers used their own improvised measures and experience to get it right. A “receipt” from a neighbor was just a list of ingredients, and a fancy addition might, if the neighbor wanted you to succeed, have a comparison, like ”the size of a plum”. It was understood that you knew how to make a cake, or whatever it was, and how much flour, butter, sugar, eggs, milk to put in to fit your pan.

So what the heck is a ”knob” of butter?

LOL!!! What a great conversation! It took me so long to type my answer about 'sticks' that I'm behind the 8-ball.

I don't think in metric either. I use a scale when needed -- then jot down the equivalent measurement in cups. lol!!!

@floral_uk z.8/9 SW UK, I think you're right. In this case, "Make your best chocolate pudding" simply meant 'make your best chocolate dessert'. I clearly didn't guess the meaning correctly.

@lindac92, how can you not love a recipe that uses a 10-cent can of tuna?! :O)

Re a 'knob' of butter, on these shows they speak of a 'knob' of ginger. At least one of the cooks didn't know how much that was either. lol. If butter, I'd go with 1 tbs for a knob. If ginger, I'd go with about a 1" piece. Total WAG though. :O)

btw, @lindac92, a kilogram is 2.2 lbs. Maybe you're thinking of a mile in terms of kilometers? that's 1 mile = 1.6 km

Conversion is easy nowadays. Google it and the converter comes up on the results page. So funny how so many of us answered the sticks at the same time!

I have a lot of recipes that have both volume and weight. I have a little apothecary scale which will measure salt almost to the grain, but a half teaspoon is usually close enough. For bread, I far prefer a scale in grams, for dry and wet ingredients. For cakes, I use volume unless I have a recipe by weights, but then I don't need measures to make a cake. i can make bread without, but I'm particular about hydration and grams is so much easier to compare percentages, and it’s harder to do by feel than cake.

PM, the pudding question was one I'd leave to Floral or Islay, but I was thinking that was the answer because how can you have any pudding if you don't eat your meat?:

@plllog LOL!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! I love it!

These cooking shows are great. One of the guys kept talking about cooking his "sapphire" aldente and I must have said "what is SAPPHIRE?" to myself a dozen times. I finally found it... he was saying "samphire"! So, wth is samphire, right?! It's a salt-tolerant succulent that's associated with water bodies. LOL!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

I ordered a German cookbook from Germany in 1969, Das grosse Taschenbuch vom Kochen, and of course all of the measurements were metric. Therefore I had to buy metric measuring equipment to do the measurements, but I did not buy a scale at that time and converted the weights to pounds and ounces, and then to volumes.

However, I learned that I really did not like German food that much, and so I did not make all that many of the recipes from this book. In the 1960s, English food was no better than German food IMO, and so I did not like that either. The only English food I liked back then was fish. But then I've always had a very difficult time finding Engish restaurants, other than tea shops or fish 'n' chips restaurants. I like scones (don't love them), but I hate crumpets, although I wanted to love them after reading about them in English literature.

My favorite British cooking show was Floyd On Food, which I think is from the 1990s. However, I was never inspired to make any of his recipes, and he often did not like them himself. More recently I have watched The Great British Baking Show, and that has a lot of good recipes, but most of them are desserts, which are not on my diet at this time. I've never loved desserts, but I do love making them. In 1977 I baked desserts for a restaurant in San Francisco, and I had to force myself to sample what I had made, so that I could judge whether it was good or not.

Whoa! Is that a foraged thing or an actual grocery store food?

Floral, do you have "wild rice"? It's a long dark grain found in North American lake marshes. Or something like that. We eat it as a normal thing, often added to regular rice (it's not actually rice itself) as an enhancement.

I'm hesitant to "waste" the new episodes of the Great British Bake Off (Baking Show where Pillsbury has a trademark on "bake off"), which are on Netflix because at least the previous years were the most perfect TV show ever. The setting is beautiful, the kitchens colorful, the contestants skillful, the challenges truly challenging, and everybody is really nice. None of the false competitiveness and bravado required by American productions. The only flaw is what they think an "American Pie" is!

Nothing better when one is sick than GBBO/S. I've never seen these other shows. I'll have to look for them. Surely an adventure in vocabulary if nothing else!

When we lived in the Netherlands, I had to learn some metric kitchen measurements. I had a handy conversion chart on my refrigerator. I referred to it mostly so I knew how much things weighed in the grocery stores - especially meat and fish. Our gas oven was marked in Celsius but it was so poorly calibrated that I put an American oven thermometer in it - the setting was arbitary whether Celsius or Farenheit. I did not cook from any Dutch recipes. I took my 1975 Joy of Cooking with me, and some favorite recipes along with my own measuring cups and spoons, as well as a meat thermometer. I'm not a baker, so didn't feel a need to have a scale.

I belong to a couple of food-related groups on Facebook comprised of expats in France. Pre-Covid, DH & I spent much time there. Most of the people are British, but some are from the US and Canada. I'm learning British cooking terms from reading their posts trying to adapt their cooking to what they find in France. But at least the Brits and the French both use the metric system.

Samphire is a wild plant that grows on mudflats but it is sold by fishmongers. It is totally delicious.

I grew up using pounds and ounces before we went metric. Now I use either depending on the recipe. There is no conversion involved. I have old brass scales and two sets of weights. Electronic scales just have a button to press to swap units but you’d only need Imperial if using an old recipe.

I never understand people’s weights in pound. I use kilograms but many people still adhere to stones and pounds. A stone is 14 pounds. Curiously few Brits measure their height in centimetres.

Yes, we can buy wild rice but it doesn't grow here.

Can’t help with ’thickened cream’. must be an Oz thing. We have single, double, whipping and clotted creams.

Thickened cream is cream with gelatine added (by the dairy) so that it will whip. Whipping cream can be substituted.

The black wild rice you often see and the stuff that comes in a bag with other rice is not real wild rice, but paddy rice, bred to grow in paddys that can ve drained and machine harvested. Real wild rice is very different, lighter colored and cooks faster and tastes different. I doubt that you can buy real wild rice unless you go on the web and have it sent. I have an Ojibwe friend who keeps me supplied. It's a rare treat!

@Lars, I don't read German but it must have just been a lousy German cookbook! (I love German food. ;^) I'm half English and grew up with kidney stew as a family favorite meal (love it!), so I did my research before going to London so that I could seek out the very best "fish & chips" while there. ugh! It was pitiful. We have much better fish fries here every Friday night. lol!

I have seen the Great British Baking show before! -- but sadly, it was spotty coverage so that I was never able to see an entire series from beginning to end. I totally loved it, though. I love to bake. I already noticed that I can stream them on hulu now, so I will definitely go through all of those. :) And, I *TOTALLY* agree about their idea of 'American Pie'!!! :p

@plllog, I did some research on marsh samphire this morning -- it's very interesting. It's been used for ages -- was originally used in making glass (ash) and is even referenced by Shakespeare.

@floral_uk z.8/9 SW UK, wow, I'm envious of your choice in creams. Stones (14 lbs) just seems like too large of a measure. My super-preemie nephew weighed 0.125 stones. lol!

@colleenoz, that's interesting about cream thickened with gelatin! Is it a lower fat content cream, hence a thickener required? What, if anything, do you use it for?

@lindac92, wow, that's a great friend!

Both thickened cream and whipping cream have a fat content of 35% or more. I guess the gelatine or other thickeners are added to ensure it will whip. Perhaps it's a climate thing. It's used wherever you want cream, whipped, in recipes, in cooking, whatever.

Things aren't generally weighed in stones until they weigh two or three at least, unless it's something that to weigh 14 lbs would be amazingly heavy, as in "Holy cow! This cat weighs a stone!"

When we first moved to our new house in Australia, I was 8. My mother sent me to the local grocery to get some food for dinner. On the list was "10lb bag of potatoes". I couldn't find the potatoes and asked one of the check out ladies where they were. She showed me and asked, "Do you want a stone or a half-stone?" I was completely puzzled and replied, "I don't want a stone, I want some potatoes please!" The kind lady explained that a stone was 14lbs and a half-stone was 7lbs, which did I want? This was another quandary, as 10lbs was pretty well halfway in between. I think I went for the half-stone, as I had to carry them a few blocks home.

@colleenoz, that's a cute story and a wise choice! and, holy cow, my cat MaryJane weighs more than a stone! :p

Kidney stew?? Never seen or even heard of that. Steak and kidney pie, yes. Steak and kidney pudding, yes. Steak and kidney casserole. Grilled kidneys. Sauteed kidneys. Yes, yes and yes. But kidney stew? Don’t recognise that. But there’s kidney stew in German cuisine.

As to fish and chips it is very variable in quality. I would not expect to find decent ones in London. The best are fried in beef dripping and sold in the North. I recently had excellent ones in County Durham.

Now back to Samphire.... there are two different plants commonly known as Samphire. One grows on salt marshes, Salicornia europaea. That’s the one we usually eat with fish. There’s also another Samphire, Crithmum maritimum, which grows on cliffs. That’s the one Shakespeare was referencing when talking about the Samphire gatherers’ dangerous work.

As colleenoz says, stones aren’t used for small quantities. Nowadays they're only really for weighing people.

I am of the age where I started to learn metric in grade school. There must have been an attempt to switch to metric in the 70s before the predictable backlash against switching to the evil cosmopolitan way to measure stuff.

Now I don’t really remember. Like Pllog I really like using baker’s percentages and grams for baking bread.

I've just realised that both of my cats weigh over a stone! :-)

@floral_uk z.8/9 SW UK, my grandfather and his entire family (for centuries) is from Bedfordshire. No German influence. Maybe his family made up their kidney stew.

@colleenoz, I’m embarrassed enough by one. lol!

My childhood cat weighed nearly a stone and a half! He was big overall, and all muscle, and champion of the neighborhood. The thing about weighing people (or large farm animals) by stones is they give room for the natural fluctuations. A person might weigh five or ten pounds more at night than in the morning.

My mother took in an abandoned cat -- the owner just moved away and left him! He was a male, long-haired, and all black (maybe he had a tiny patch of white on his bib?). His name was Choo-Choo. I think he had eating issues after being abandoned and was worried when his next meal would be, because that boy could eat. My sister entered him in a "fat cat" contest that the Humane Society was having. My sister and mother carried him in and they all took one look and knew the scale wouldn't handle him. LOL!!! They got a larger scale, plopped him on, and he won HANDILY at 32 lbs. Their picture was in the newspaper. I measured his waist -- he could have worn my jeans. :O)

Pillog, we don't only weigh in stones. We also include the odd pounds. So you might weight 8 stone 5 pounds or something.

Oh! Well that's no fun! It reminds me of the old money. Ours have fun names but all add up to one figure in decimal. The old English system was poetic but keeping track of guineas, pounds, shillings and pence with different base amounts must have made the populace adept at arithmetic!

PM, that was one extraordnary cat!

I've just remembered that I saw in some TV show that they put gelatin in the whipped cream for a Princess cake. It was supposed to stabilize the cream. They also didn't put the top cake layer on, meaning the cream would have to hold the dome shape with nothing but the marzipan covering to hold it.

Colleen, do you think the thickened cream is meant for structural things like that? Maybe between cake layers? If it helps keep the cream from melting and oozing out, that would be good! I don't much like cream fillings so the gelatine is new to me.

I think the gelatine helps in structural applications, but thickened cream is used for about every purpose here. It's straight whipping cream is harder to find- not impossible, but if there are ten cream products on the supermarket shelf, nine will be thickened cream and one straight whipping cream. I suspect it's because our climate is warmer and it helps the cream hold its shape longer, as regular whipping cream tends to collapse and go yellow and weepy after not very long, maybe a couple of hours.

I actually prefer UHT treated cream, as it's pretty well impossible to overbeat into butter, holds its shape for days, as a cake topping it doesn't go yellow and weepy but still s good for several days and I think has a better "mouth feel", not having the graininess that whipping cream can have.

I think there may be a difference in the cows? The pure whipping cream I buy doesn't have those troubles, though it will melt on a cake that isn't chilled.

The gelatin stabalizes it. Cows are cows....and while some give higher burrerfat milk, whipping cream is standardized for fat content. Whipped cream will wilt even if you refrigerate it.

People who want to frost a cake with whipped cream and not eat it all immediately stabalize their whipped cream.

https://veenaazmanov.com/stabilize-whipped-cream-5-different-methods/#five-ways-to-stabilize-whipped-cream

UK cream definitions in case you want to follow a UK recipe.

Clotted cream

The cream is clotted and contains not less than 55 per cent milk fat (w/w).

Double cream

The cream contains not less than 48 per cent milk fat (w/w).

Whipping cream

The cream contains not less than 35 per cent milk fat (w/w).

Whipped cream

The cream contains not less than 35 per cent milk fat (w/w) and has been whipped.

Sterilised cream

The cream is sterilised cream and contains not less than 23 per cent milk fat (w/w).

Cream or single cream

The cream is not sterilised cream and contains not less than 18 per cent milk fat(w/w).

Sterilised half cream

The cream is sterilised cream and contains not less than 12 per cent milk fat (w/w).

Half cream

The cream is not sterilised cream and contains not less than 12 per cent milk fat (w/w).

Sour or Soured cream

The cream has been fermented with harmless microorganisms or

through acidification.

Sweet cream

Cream skimmed from the higher butterfat layer of milk before homogenisation.

Crème fraiche

Sour cream with a milk fat content of not less than 25% (w/w).se

https://www.dairyuk.org/wp-content/uploads/2018/12/FINAL-Compositional-Standards-Cream.pdf

‘not less than’ is important. It’s often higher in good brands.

Thanks, Floral! I can never keep track of UK creams and just look it up and guestimate if I'm using a British recipe.

Mostly we have what used to be called xxx (before porn) whipping cream, or ”heavy” whipping cream, where I live. I know one store that stocks light cream. American definitions. We do have sour cream (two types, but I couldn't describe the difference, though I think it might be pure cultured cream vs. one that has milk and other things in it (I buy the former)) and crème fraîche. I don't count the ”diet” products that are supposed to taste like sour cream but with less fat and more stabilizers. we also have ”half and half”, as in half cream and half milk, though I'm sure there's a defined fat content. It's meant for coffee, but many recipes use it because for a long time people were more likely to have it than cream. But we don't have all those different ones. We just use heavy whipping cream and add milk if we want it thinner.