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Asparagus Pudding
Take half a hundred young asparagus, and cut up the green part into pieces as small as peas. Beat a piece of butter the size of an egg to a cream; add to it a cupful of flour, two tea-spoonfuls of finely-chopped ham, four eggs well beaten, the asparagus, and a little pepper and salt. Mix all well together, and add sufficient milk to make it into a stiff batter. Put it into a well-oiled mould, wrap it in a floured cloth, and place in a saucepan of boiling water. When sufficiently cooked, turn it on a hot dish, and pour good melted butter round it. This is a very nice way of cooking asparagus. Time to boil, two hours. Probable cost, 2s. for a pint mould. Sufficient for half a dozen persons.
A savoury steamed batter pudding of the kind Victorian cooks turned out routinely and modern ones almost never do. Nothing here is difficult, but three of the terms mean something other than what they appear to.
- "Melted butter" is a sauceIn nineteenth-century English cookery books melted butter means a flour-thickened butter sauce — roughly a tablespoon of flour cooked in an ounce of butter, let down with about half a pint of water or milk and seasoned. Pouring plain liquid butter around the pudding will give you a greasy plate rather than the intended coating.
- "Half a hundred" asparagusFifty spears of the thin market asparagus of the period, of which only the green tips are used, cut up small. Modern equivalents can only be approximate: allow two or three supermarket bunches untrimmed to yield a decent bowl of pea-sized green pieces.
- Butter the size of an eggAbout 2 oz, or 4 tablespoons. A "cupful" in a book of this date is not a standardised measure, so go by consistency rather than weight: add the milk slowly and stop at a stiff, dropping batter.
- The mould and the clothA pint mould is a small pudding basin. Butter it well (the original says oiled, meaning greased), cover with pleated greaseproof paper and foil or the floured cloth, and stand it in a pan with boiling water coming two-thirds up the sides. Keep a kettle going and top the water up; if it boils dry the batter scorches to the mould.
- Two hours is generousTwo hours -- The recipe gives two hours for a pint mould, which may be longer than a small basin of egg-rich batter needs. Start testing with a skewer at around an hour and a half; it should come out clean, and if it does not, give it longer.
- The hamTwo teaspoonfuls of finely chopped ham is a seasoning, not a filling — dry-cured ham or a trimming of gammon, chopped almost to a mince. Salt with a light hand afterwards, since the ham and the sauce both bring their own.
- Turning outLet the pudding stand five minutes off the heat before inverting, or the outside crumbles away with the mould. Serve at once; a steamed batter collapses and toughens as it cools.
- YieldSix portions as a side dish or light savoury course, not as a main. The stated cost of 2s. was a fair sum for a vegetable dish, which tells you asparagus was still a luxury.
Cassell's belongs to the great age of the English boiled and steamed pudding, when a cloth-wrapped basin in a pan of water was as ordinary a piece of kitchen procedure as a roasting tin, and the form was applied to savoury mixtures as readily as to sweet ones. Asparagus reached British tables from market gardens around London and the Vale of Evesham in a short spring season, expensive enough that a cook who had bought it looked for ways to make it stretch \— bound into a batter with eggs and flour, fifty spears feed six. The chopped ham is a standard Victorian trick for lending savour to an otherwise mild vegetable dish, and the \"good melted butter\" poured round is often said to be a characteristic sauce for asparagus in the period, thickened rather than plain so that it clings. The confident closing note, \"this is a very nice way of cooking asparagus,\" is characteristic of the dictionary's tone: brisk, practical, and addressed to a cook who already knew how to manage a pudding cloth.