Bob Terwilliger wrote:
> RobtE insisted:
>
>
>>>>summer pudding goes back only to the 1930s.
>>>
>>>WHAT?? You have to be kidding. You are, right?
>>
>>Nope.
>
>
> from http://www.foodtimeline.org/foodpuddings.html#summer:
>
> "Summer pudding. A favourite English dessert which combines a mixture of
> summer fruits with bread. Redcurrants...and raspberries are the best fruits
> to use, but some varieties of gooseberry are suitable, and a small quantity
> of blackcurrants and very few strawberries may be included. In autumn,
> blackberries can be substituted. In other countries, corresponding kinds of
> berry will do very well...In the 19th century this pudding seems to have
> been known as 'hydropathic pudding' because it was served at health resorts
> where pastry was forbidden. This name must have begun to seem unattractive
> or inappropriate early in the 20th century, when the new name summer
> pudding, which is now universally used, began to appear in print. Until
> recently it was thought that the earliest recorded use was by Florence Perry
> (1917) who, on the title page of her attractive book, styled herself The
> Pudding Lady'...However, it has now been established that a missionary in
> India, Miss E.S. Poynter (1904), had used the term much earlier, in her
> book; and that soon afterwards Miss L. Sykes (c. 1912) used it as the title
> of a recipe which was even closer than Miss Poynter's to those now in use."
> ---Oxford Companion to Food, Alan Davidson [Oxford University Press:Oxford]
> 1999 (p. 770)
>
>
> You just make stuff up as you go along, don't you?
>
> Bob
>
>
From http://www.greatbritishkitchen.co.uk/eh_summer.htm

"There is a widely held belief that summer pudding was once called
'hydropathic pudding' and was served in spas, precursors to today's
health farms, where earlier generations went to be cleansed and reduced.
Another theory - that it was a summer substitute for the great suet
puddings of Victorian England - would fix its origins in the nineteenth
century. Many modern food writers adhere to this version of history,
hinting that the dessert has only recently been rediscovered.

Alas, it is not true. Summer pudding appears not to have existed before
the twentieth century. Although there were antecedents, they used stewed
fruit. Dr Johnson's pudding consists of rhubarb between layers of bread
in a pudding basin, while Wakefield pudding is any stewed fruit, though
most commonly rhubarb and gooseberries, inside a bread-lined bowl.
Before the twentieth century there is no evidence of any pudding of any
name that packs raw summer berries into a bread casing.

In Mary Novak's book English Puddings Sweet and Savoury first published
in 1981, she explains that "raw fruit was considered extremely
unhealthy...there are still many people of the older generation who
refuse raw fruit and will even stew strawberries and raspberries before
eating them". Hardly likely, then, that spas would be offering raw fruit
puddings to their clientele. Massey and Sons Comprehensive Pudding Book,
published in 1874 lists one thousand recipes, none resembling summer
pudding.

The earliest published summer pudding recipe appears to be in a book
unassumingly titled Sweets No. 6, published in 1902 and written by S.
Beaty-Pownall, departmental editor of Housewife and Cuisine at 'Queen
Newspaper'. However, into her plain china mould or basin lined with
bread 'as for apple charlotte', the esteemed departmental editor pours
hot stewed fruit. Although the fruit in today's summer pudding may be
warmed until the juices run, the whole point of the pudding is a filling
of unstewed berries in their juicy prime.

Somewhere along the line, we appear to have invented a romantic history
for this, one of our favourite puddings. The ruthless truth is exposed
by John Ayton in The Diner's Dictionary where he says "The name 'summer
pudding' was coined in the 1930s".