National Vanilla Pudding Day

Five Food Finds about Pudding

  • The Fortress hotel in Galle, Sri Lanka, is charging $14,500 a serving of the world’s most expensive pudding, which is called “The Fortress Stilt Fisherman Indulgence”.
  • Hasty pudding, originally a British dish, this pudding could be made on very short notice.  Ingredients vary, but it was basically a sweetened porridge made from flour, tapioca or oatmeal and milk. The term originated in the late 16th century.
  • 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.
  • Meat pudding would be a savory example of a pudding dish.

Today’s Food History

on this day in…

1859 Sir Arthur Conan Doyle was born. Creator of Sherlock Holmes. Holmes would go for days without food while working on a case.

1892 Dr. Washington Sheffeld invented the collapsible metal toothpaste tube.

1894 African American inventor S. Newson patented an “oil heater or cooker.”

1931 Canned rattlesnake goes on sale. Packed by George K. End of Arcadia, Florida. Not quite as big a hit as Spam.

1934 R.I.P.David Wesson. An American chemist who developed a method to make cotton seed oil edible. Cotton seed oil has almost no taste, so it allows the flavors of other foods to come through. It is used in the manufacture of margarine, salad dressings, in commercially fried foods, and of course, Wesson Oil.

1946 The Culinary Institute of America is founded.