Traditional English foods second part

There are still more English traditonal dishes that were not mentioned in the previous post. I am going to continue here the last post where I was talking about the most popular English dishes https://englishpractiseandculture.blogspot.co.uk/2018/02/traditional-english-foods.html. Here they are:

Traditional English breakfast:  The traditional English breakfast consists of fried bacon, fried eggs, or scrambled eggs, beans, fried champignons, sausages and some slices of toasts with butter. It is served with coffee, tea and or orange juice. It can also include black or white pudding (English sausage). This breakfast is usually eaten on weekends most of the time, because it is when people has more time to cook it and enjoy it without the rush of going to work. After having this breakfast, a light lunch is followed, such as a sandwich. This is considered as a  fried breakfast, and it takes some time to prepare it. It is served in pubs and in many types of English restaurants all over the country.It is also commonly served in bed and breakfasts.
But this breakfast is so popular that it became a very popular dish all over the world. It is dates back to the Middle Ages, when only two meals were eaten per day, breakfast and dinner, breakfast could be eaten at the early morning or later on in the morning. However, the concept of the tradiontal english breakfast became so popular in the Georgian and Victorian times (19th and 20th century), where the upper middle class wanted to enjoy a long, calm and paused breakfast. It was in this period of time when eggs and cured bacon started to be introduced for breakfast. It was make a classic of the English cuisine in this time, when it became very popular in the brekafast of the upper middle English classes. There are many variants of it depending on the region where it is served, just by having some different  ingredients such as harsh browns in Ireland. 

Battenberg cake: This cake is a light sponge cake made by prepearing two different cakes each one having a different colour, and then combining them together making a two combination colour pattern; yellow and pink distrubated in two layers. It is covered with white or yellow marzipan and assembled with apricot jam. The origin of this cake comes back to the Victorian Ages, when they were celebrating the marriage of Princess Victoria with Prince Louis of Battenberg (Quee´s Victoria granddaughter). The cake is very original, but is not very famous or common as other types of cakes for tea time.

Bread and butter pudding: bread and butter pudding appears in the 13th century in England, where it was considered to be a poor´s man pudding. When there was a shortage of food, genuily they decided to put some buttered bread cut into slices, raisins, melted butter, brown sugar and milk over it and baked it, giving place to the famous "bread and butter pudding". Usally, is done by using the leftover bread.It can be flavored with vanilla or any other types of spices. This recipe has been very popular all over the time until nowadays. It can be done by using cream instead of milk and suggar. Other recipes can add jam to the buttered bread giving it another flavour. It is baked in the oven. There is a similar version in the American cuisine called "cold bread pudding". 

                                     

Term pudding definition: The Oxford etymological dictionary defines pudding as type of sausage, but lets see the definition provided here: 

c. 1300, "a kind of sausage: the stomach or one of the entrails of a pig, sheep, etc., stuffed with minced meat, suet, seasoning, boiled and kept till needed," perhaps from a West Germanic stem *pud- "Other possibility is the traditional one that it is from Old French boudin "sausage," from Vulgar Latin *botellinus, from Latin botellus "sausage" (change of French b- to English p- presents difficulties, but compare purse (n.)). The modern sense had emerged by 1670, from extension to other foods boiled or steamed in a bag or sack (16c.). German pudding, French pouding, Swedish pudding, Irish putog are from English. Pudding-pie attested from 1590s.

The orignal meaning of the word pudding in the 14th century was sausage, but with the time the term started to replace the term dessert or sweet for pudding in England. I decided to make a litlte incise in the explanation about this term, since it is widely used in the British cuisine and sometimes, and most often than not, it can be confusing for many people, especially for the non English people. We saw in  previous posts of the blog that i mentioned"Yorkshire puddings" and now we are talking about "bread and butter pudding. So that, the term "pudding" is used in different ways: 

1.It is used when we talk about desserts, "what is there for pudding today?" meaning what is there for dessert.

2.  As a name for some of the English traditional dishes, such as Yorkshire pudding, bread and butter pudding, it can be both savoury or sweet.

3. Name to one typical english sausage, black pudding.

Even though, in its origin it meant sausage, comming from a latin term. The OED give us two possible origins, although the latter one comming from  the Latin word botellus, is the more accepted nowadays as the real origin and excluding the first one. The English were the ones that introduced the battered sausages making it a savoury dish in the Middle Ages, calling it pudding and introducing this new concept in cooking.