Podynge

Part of speech: noun

Definitions

1. An old spelling of a soft, cooked food, often a sweet dessert or a savory mixture boiled in a casing or cloth
2. A archaic form of the word for a soft cooked dish, whether a sweet dessert or a meaty sausage-like preparation
3. An early variant spelling for a dish made of ingredients boiled, steamed or baked into a soft, thick mass

Etymology: "Podynge" is a Middle English spelling of "pudding," and it appears in the late 1300s in the sense of the stuffed animal intestine that the dish was originally made in. The word's roots are uncertain: it was likely borrowed into Middle English from Old French "boudin" (blood sausage), which itself traces to Latin "botellus" (a little sausage), a diminutive of "botulus" (sausage, or intestine). Other suggestions, such as a link to Latin "botulus" through a different route, have not been confirmed. Over the centuries the sense drifted from the casing to the filling. Medieval cooks stuffed minced meat, grains, and spices into intestines, and the name came to refer to the mixture itself. By the 1500s, "pudding" could be used for a wide range of stuffed or boiled dishes, and it eventually came to mean the sweet dessert course that English speakers now know.