( Shutterstock)Ĭooking vocabulary is a place where American English and British English tend to diverge a lot. Simple! Basically everything is called something different, actually The British call these flapjacks. So you’ve got it, right? A British biscuit is an American cookie and an American cookie is a British cookie and an American biscuit is a British scone and an American scone is something else entirely. What about chewy cookies, like chocolate chip or snickerdoodle? These aren't nearly as common in the UK as they are in the US, but when they're made there, they're still called cookies. That's why the biscuit challenges on The Great British Baking Show usually include both sweet biscuits and savory ones. They're baked in the oven, and they're crisp, not chewy. Biscuits can be sweet (shortbread) or savory. To most of the rest of the English-speaking world, a biscuit is what Americans would refer to as either a cookie or a cracker. But American scones are different, because nothing about this is uncomplicated. They are close to what the British would call scones. ( Shutterstock)Īmerican biscuits are small, fluffy quick breads, leavened with baking powder or buttermilk and served with butter and jam or gravy. (It also might originally be Canadian, not British.) Americans are the outlier on how we use "biscuit" Biscuits, to the British. The best example is sticky toffee pudding, a date cake with caramel sauce that's traditionally steamed but is now often baked. Jam roly-poly, or roly-poly pudding, is traditionally steamed it consists of a pastry made with suet, spread with jam, and rolled up.Īnd just to make things a bit more confusing, some dishes are referred to as "puddings" that are sometimes baked but formerly were boiled or steamed. Other puddings are sweet, such as spotted dick - a sort of steamed cake with currants that's barely sweet and, like many puddings, flavored with suet, or beef fat, rather than butter. The earliest puddings, in this sense of the word, were sausages black pudding, a type of sausage made with pig's blood, is sometimes included in a traditional English breakfast. American puddings are closer to what the Brits would call "custard."Ī British pudding is a dish, savory or sweet, that's cooked by being boiled or steamed in something: a dish, a piece of cloth, or even animal intestine. Nancy Mitford, in a famous essay comparing the speech of upper-class Britons with everyone else, categorized "pudding" as used by the elite and "sweet" as used by the proletariat.)īut a pudding can also be a specific dish - and a British pudding still isn't the same as an American one. "Pudding" can refer generically to the sweet, final course of a meal, what Americans know as "dessert." (Because it's the UK, this has class implications. But underlying those differences are longstanding cultural divergences that explain not just why the two nations call food different things, but why they eat so differently. The differences between what British people and Americans mean by "pudding" and "biscuit" might sound silly. So to accompany your Thanksgiving viewing of the greatest baking competition of our time, here's a guide to what they're actually talking about. I've watched too many episodes of The Great British Baking Show to still not know what British people mean by "pudding."
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