Creativity and Pig Entrails

The post below is by my friend and fellow blogger Katie Jett Walls, who writes over at One Per Week. We’re both participating in the 2010 Wordcount Blogathon, and today’s assignment was to swap blogs with someone; we chose each other. Awww….

My name is Katie, I’m a Fire Dragon, and I’ve been friends with Amanda since sometime along the way in our mutual flirtation with improvisation. We were briefly neighbors, and we’ve been drunk together on many nights. She gave me marvelous champagne flutes as a wedding gift. She writes, about her blog Tastee Pudding: “In the search for the creative life, the proof is in the pudding.”

I got to wondering how exactly how we came to say this phrase, “the proof is in the pudding” (maybe I only wondered because of fellow blogathon writer Joann Mason, who writes about the origins of English idioms). I sort of know what it means -  it means you know a thing is good if it holds up to it’s promise, or if the experience lives up to the expectation.

I thought there might be more than that. One does not have to be even slightly clever to Google half an hours worth of reading on origins of proverbs to learn that this particular gem is a truncation of the adage “The proof of the pudding’s in the eating.” This phrase was in use waaay back, showing up in writings as early as 1300 AD, and as a proverb attributable to Cervantes in Don Quixote (some think it’s more likely a misinterpretation of the Spanish ‘boudin’ – which is a meat sausage). Then I learned that pudding actually often did refer to something more like sausage than dessert. One site said,

“The OED describes the mediaeval pudding as ‘the stomach or one of the entrails of a pig, sheep, or other animal, stuffed with a mixture of minced meat, suet, oatmeal, seasoning, etc., and boiled‘.”

GROSS. But I’m sure someone liked it – I mean, we still eat sausage!

This got me thinking. Often, our creative lives are a mishmash of odd parts. Few of us are gifted so completely in one area as are the Rembrandts, the Nerudas, the Coppolas of the world. Most of us are gifted, but it might be a mix of things we bring to the “pudding”. It might be a knack for improv, a love of photography, an obsession with cooking, and a bit of a way with words. When “finding” our creative life, the proof is in the experience – when you bite into it, chew it up and savor it, when you swallow it, are you satisfied? If not – go ahead and change the recipe!

Note from Amanda: As Katie noted, it’s ironic that she wrote about sausage for my blog, since I wrote about why I’m a vegetarian for hers…