> Recently, I've been hearing the idiom "the proof of the pudding is in the eating" distorted into just "the proof is in the pudding." This morning, I heard someone on a radio show who used the phrase "the truth is in the pudding."
>
> That's weird. The phrase must have been "the proof of the pudding is in the eating" for a hundred years or more, but it's diverged into at least two alternate forms in a fiftieth that time. The language is evolving before our eyes.
>
> Of course, "the proof is in the pudding" may be much older than that, but it doesn't seem like it. The oldest reference to it that I can find on the 'net is from 2001, and I had never heard the phrase until earlier this year.
>
> Plus there's that link down there.
>
> Rabbit"the tooth is in the"lord

The phrase I remember hearing is "The proof of the pudding is in the tasting", and there are two reasons that I'm inclined to believe that was the original wording:

1) "Proof", in this context, means "testing" (as it also does in "the exception proves the rule"), so that it roughly means "You don't know if the pudding's any good untill you taste it. Note that you don't need to *eat* it to prove it.

2) It was in this form that it appeared in a quote from Miguel de Cervantes' /The Adventures of Don Quixote/. This might well have been the original source, so far as I'm aware.

wintermute