Pease Pudding

Pease Pudding Hot
Pease Pudding Cold
Pease Pudding in the pot
Nine days old.

Some like it hot.
Some like it cold.
Some like it in the pot
Nice days old.


Most of us recognize this nursery rhyme as being "Pease Porridge Hot" rather than Pease Pudding. When I took my son to a historic site yesterday, one of the workers was making Pease Pudding and explained that the song originally said pease pudding. Doing a google search, I learned that it isn't actually a pudding or a porridge, but a sauce that they changed the name to pudding for the alliteration of the rhyme. So, in essence, the name of this dish has been changed at least twice for this rhyme.

It is not uncommon to provoke poetic license when writing lyrics to a song. Nor it is uncommon to change the lyrics of a song. Sometimes this is done for fun and drastically changes the meaning of the song by changing most of the words, othertimes, as in "pudding" and "porridge" it is only one word.

One thing that my family sometimes does is to sing one song to the tune of another. I use to be able to sign the words to "Amazing Grace" to the tune of "Gilligan's Island." When he was 3, my oldest asked us how to say the alphabet backwards. We practiced our "ZYX's" until we could sign them to him -- using the ABC's tune. We sing the alphabet, without the "L" to the tune of the verse for "The First Noel". To the chorus of the song, we sing "Nooo L, No L, Nooo L, No L, The alphabet with Nooooooo L."

I have never tried Pease Pudding, or Pease Porridge. I can't imagine anything sitting in a pot for 9 days and still eating it, but I did enjoy the history lesson on the song and thinking about how I contribute to the changing of popular lyrics.