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National Chocolate Pudding Day

Next celebratedSaturday, June 26, 2027

Chocolate pudding is soft, dark and eaten with a spoon rather than a fork. Cook a pan of it slowly on the stove, or beat a packet into cold milk on National Chocolate Pudding Day, and eat it straight out of the bowl.

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Last updated September 7, 2026 · by the Holiday Calendar TeamHave an update or spot an error?
YEARLY DATEJune 26
OBSERVED INUnited States
CATEGORYFood
SUBCATEGORYDesserts
ORIGIN

Community Origin

FOUNDING ENTITY
Not documented
FIRST OBSERVED
Not documented
“CooksInfo takes the date further back still, to a Missouri newspaper column of June 1997 whose author had found it on a website.
HOW THE HOLIDAY CAME TO BE

The printed trail leads to a periodical, not a kitchen.

No founder or establishing record for June 26 has been located, and the Federal Register carries no document under the day's name. The earliest print appearance of the full name is a 2007 listing in a periodical called Creative forecasting, which dates the listing rather than the day.

+ Know the story? Submit a founder Help us complete this holiday
INTRO

What actually happens when chocolate pudding sets

Tip a packet of instant chocolate pudding into cold milk, beat it for a minute, and something is going on that has almost nothing to do with the cooked pudding it imitates. The powder is not thickening the milk. It is setting the milk's own protein.

General Foods patented that trick, and the specification is blunt about it. An alkali pyrophosphate coagulates the milk protein, an alkali orthophosphate speeds the gelling along, and pregelatinized starch turns up only as a stiffening agent to give body to the texture. A cooked starch pudding, the same document notes, gets its consistency from gelatinization of the starch.

So the two things in the American cupboard that answer to one name are held together by two different pieces of chemistry. Chocolate is the flavour. The set is the dessert.

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ORIGINS

Chocolate Pudding Day history

CHAPTER 01

The first one was baked

Go back far enough and a chocolate pudding is neither cold nor spoonable. The Food Timeline gives the earliest print reference it has found as 1730, in Charles Carter's The Complete Practical Cook, and the thing described is closer to a rich baked custard: eight eggs to a pint of cream, nutmeg and cinnamon and ginger, a quarter pound of grated chocolate, a little minced citron. Carter tells the cook to line the dish with puff paste and bake it, or boil it if you please.

CHAPTER 02

Starch takes the job away from eggs

The modern dessert begins with a change of thickener. The Food Timeline credits the English chemist Alfred Bird with putting flavoured cornstarch on sale as custard powder in 1847, an alternative to thickening with eggs. By 1904 you can watch the two ingredients doing different jobs in Fannie Merritt Farmer's method: her corn starch pudding cooks the starch in a double boiler until the mixture thickens, and the beaten egg goes in at the very end, because it is there for richness and not for structure.

CHAPTER 03

The box that changed the chemistry

The next change came out of a laboratory rather than a kitchen. US Patent 2,801,924, filed by General Foods with no drawing in it, names Adolph S. Clausi of Battle Creek, Michigan, as its inventor. It says plainly why the earlier no-cook mixes failed: leaning on pregelatinized starch alone took so much starch that it left a starchy flavour and a pasty texture.

Clausi's answer was to stop asking the starch to set anything at all.

The day itself came later and quieter. Its earliest appearance in print under the full name sits in a 2007 volume of a periodical called Creative forecasting, a long way from Battle Creek and a very long way from Charles Carter.

TIMELINE

Timeline

The earliest chocolate pudding in print

Charles Carter's The Complete Practical Cook carries a chocolate pudding built on eggs and cream, to be baked under puff paste or boiled. Nutmeg, cinnamon, ginger and minced citron go in with it.

Custard powder replaces the eggs

The Food Timeline credits Alfred Bird, an English chemist, with selling flavoured cornstarch as custard powder, an alternative to thickening with eggs.

Chocolate arrives as an afterthought

Fannie Merritt Farmer prints Corn Starch Pudding and, directly beneath it, Chocolate Corn Starch Pudding: melt a third of a square of unsweetened chocolate into the plain one.

A pudding that needs no cooking

The Food Timeline's survey of the newspapers turns up Amazo, a cold-milk cornstarch pudding from the American Maize-Products Company, on sale in New York at about fourteen cents a package.

General Foods patents the instant kind

US Patent 2,801,924 is granted to Adolph S. Clausi. Its worked examples include a chocolate formula: cocoa, sugar, pregelatinized potato starch and two phosphate salts.

WHY THIS DAY MATTERS

Why We Love National Chocolate Pudding Day

Definition

The dessert is named for the chocolate and defined by the starch.

Merriam-Webster does not define the American dessert by chocolate. It defines it as sweetened milk or cream cooked with a thickener such as eggs, flour, tapioca or cornstarch. Change the thickener and you have changed the dish, which is how chocolate pudding, chocolate mousse and chocolate ice cream end up as three different desserts made of nearly the same things.

Interference

Everything that makes it rich fights the set

Sugar added in a high ratio to the starch inhibits the granular swelling, and egg, fat and dry milk solids do the same. A chocolate pudding carries more of all four than a plain cornstarch one. The richest version of the dessert is also the fussiest to set, and that is not the cook's fault.

Permanence

A set that will not melt back

Starch gels are thermo-irreversible. Warm a chocolate pudding and it stays a pudding. Warm a gelatin dessert and it goes back to liquid, which is the real line between a pudding and a jelly, and it is a property of the starch rather than of the flavour.

BY THE NUMBERS

National Chocolate Pudding Day by the Numbers

113.4 g
Powder per pint, 1957 instant chocolate mix
About 60 C
Where cornstarch starts to gelatinize
About 5 minutes
Set time, the 1957 patent's chocolate mix
8 minutes
Double boiler time, 1904 pudding recipe
the excessive amount of starch required imparts a disagreeably starchy flavor and a pasty texture
US Patent 2,801,924General Foods' instant pudding patent, 1957, on the no-cook mixes that came before it
These canned puddings which have been subjected to a retort step during processing do not possess the texture and flavor which consumers associate with home-cooked pudding
US Patent 4,906,489General Foods' aseptically-packaged pudding patent, 1990, on the ready-to-eat cup

GOOD TO KNOW

Surprising facts about National Chocolate Pudding Day

Peter Pan got to the phrase first

J. M. Barrie's Peter Pan puts chocolate pudding day on the map of a child's mind in 1911, in a list that runs from verbs that take the dative to getting into braces. It reads there as a fixture of the nursery week rather than an observance, and nothing ties it to a date in June.

Chocolate pudding was once nursing work

Fannie Merritt Farmer wrote Food and Cookery for the Sick and Convalescent for the trained nurses she taught, opened it with a line from Florence Nightingale, and put Chocolate Corn Starch Pudding on page 174 of the 1904 edition.

The chocolate mix still had vanilla in it

The chocolate column of the 1957 patent's ingredient table lists 1.4 grams of vanilla flavouring beside its 16 grams of cocoa. The flavour most people treat as the opposite of chocolate was in the box the whole time.

The patent tells you how to pick the texture

Beating the mix hard whips air into it, which the specification says may be objectionable if the creamy type of texture is that desired, and its remedy is a foam depressant such as coconut oil. For the chiffon-like version, use milk at about 32 F. Go much above 90 F and the texture turns soft.

The dictionary's first pudding is a sausage

Merriam-Webster's opening sense of the word is blood sausage. The sweet meanings come second, and even there the entry covers a boiled or baked soft food usually built on a cereal base before it reaches anything you would eat with a spoon.

GOOD TO KNOW

National Chocolate Pudding Day Around the World

The U.S. and Canada

Chocolate pudding means the cold, light, chocolate-flavoured custard sold in cups and boxes, eaten on its own or used to fill a pie or a layer cake.

Britain

Oxford's first sense of pudding is not a recipe at all but a course: a sweet dish eaten at the end of a meal, with afters and dessert given as synonyms. Merriam-Webster files that British usage as its own separate sense.

Australia, Ireland and New Zealand

Ask for chocolate pudding and you are more likely to get a warm, self-saucing cake, served with ice cream, a vanilla custard sauce or thick spooning cream.

GET INVOLVED

How to Celebrate National Chocolate Pudding Day

EDITOR'S PICK

Make one from scratch and watch it turn

Cornstarch, sugar, cocoa, milk, and a spoon you do not put down. Somewhere on the way to the boil a thin pan of liquid becomes a thick one, in the space of a few seconds. That moment is the whole dessert, and you only get to see it if you cook it yourself.

SLAKE

Slake the cornstarch before it meets the heat

Stir it into a little of the cold milk first and add that slurry to the pan. Cornstarch does not dissolve instantly, and the swelling that comes with hydration easily causes lumping, which is why the slurry method is still the standard one.

MAKE

Make the boxed kind alongside it

Set the two side by side and taste them cold. One was thickened by heat and a starch you cooked; the other was set in a bowl of cold milk by salts working on the milk itself. They are not the same dessert wearing different hats.

READ

Read the patent that made it instant

The chocolate formula is printed in the specification, ingredient by ingredient, gram by gram, in a table beside three vanilla ones. Read it once and the packet stops being a mystery.

Test your knowledge

How well do you know National Chocolate Pudding Day?

1 / 8

In a cooked chocolate pudding, what is the cornstarch actually doing?

Answer

No. It is an unofficial observance: the Federal Register carries no document under the name, and June 26 is an ordinary working day in the United States.

COLOPHON

Sources

How we know what’s on this page. References, not endorsements.

12sources
8primary records
6independently dated
Primary records
United States Patent Office1957-08-06
Pudding composition and process of producing the same, US Patent 2,801,924
Adolph S. Clausi's instant pudding patent, assigned to General Foods. It states that cooked starch puddings get their consistency from gelatinization of the starch, that an earlier all-starch instant tasted starchy and pasty, and that this pudding instead sets by coagulating milk protein with phosphate salts. Its worked examples include a chocolate formula with gram weights, a one pint milk quantity, a 40 F milk temperature and a five minute set.
View source
United States Patent Office1990-03-06
Aseptically-packaged pudding, US Patent 4,906,489
General Foods' patent for the ready-to-eat pudding cup. Its background section records that home preparation of cooked and instant puddings was declining, and that retort-processed canned puddings did not have the texture and flavour consumers associated with home-cooked pudding.
View source
Internet Archive1904
Fannie Merritt Farmer, Food and Cookery for the Sick and Convalescent
A full scan of the 1904 first edition, published in Boston by Little, Brown and Company and written for the trained nurses Farmer taught. Page 174 carries Corn Starch Pudding, whose starch cooks for eight minutes before a beaten egg goes in for one, and Chocolate Corn Starch Pudding directly beneath it.
View source
Project Gutenberg1911
J. M. Barrie, Peter Pan
The full text of Barrie's 1911 novel, in which the phrase chocolate pudding day appears once, inside the first chapter's description of what is drawn on the map of a child's mind.
View source
HathiTrust Digital Library
Full-text phrase search for National Chocolate Pudding Day
A phrase search across HathiTrust's full-text index, returning exactly two volumes that contain the day's full name, both of a periodical called Creative forecasting, dated 2007 and 2008.
View source
Merriam-Webster2026-09-02
Pudding, Definition and Meaning
The dictionary entry whose first sense is blood sausage, whose American dessert sense is defined by the thickener used, naming eggs, flour, tapioca or cornstarch, and which files the British sense of pudding as dessert separately.
View source
Oxford University Press
Pudding, noun, Oxford Advanced Learner's Dictionary
The dictionary entry whose first sense is British and describes a course rather than a recipe, a sweet dish eaten at the end of a meal, with afters, dessert and sweet given as synonyms.
View source
Office of the Federal Register
Federal Register document search API
The searchable index of United States federal documents, which returns no document carrying the phrase National Chocolate Pudding Day or Chocolate Pudding Day.
View source
Additional coverage
BCcampus Open Textbooks
Types of Thickening Agents, in Understanding Ingredients for the Canadian Baker
An open textbook chapter explaining that cooked cornstarch granules absorb water, swell and rupture into a thickened mixture, that this gelatinization begins at about 60 C and completes at the boiling point, and that sugar, egg, fat and dry milk solids all inhibit the granules from swelling.
View source
BCcampus Open Textbooks
Gelatinization, in Modern Pastry and Plated Dessert Techniques
An open textbook chapter setting out that starch gels are thermo-irreversible and do not melt on reheating, unlike gelatin and agar, and that cornstarch is classically dispersed as a slurry to stop it lumping.
View source
The Food Timeline
Food Timeline, history notes: puddings
A sourced food-history compendium that gives the earliest print reference to chocolate pudding as Charles Carter's The Complete Practical Cook of 1730, quoted in full, credits Alfred Bird with custard powder in 1847, and, from a survey of the newspapers, places the first no-cook cold-milk pudding, Amazo, in American shops in 1949.
View source
CooksInfo2021-09-05
Chocolate Pudding Day
A food reference page giving the June 26 date, describing the North American dessert as a light chocolate custard and the Australian, Irish and New Zealand version as a warm self-saucing cake, and quoting a Missouri newspaper column of 19 June 1997 as the earliest print mention of the day it knows of.
View source
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