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Beef Steak and Kidney Pudding
Take one pound of rump steak, beat and cut it into long strips for rolling, or, if preferred, pieces about half an inch square. Season well with pepper and salt, and dredge over it a little flour; cut half a pound of beef kidney into thin slices, season in the same way, and lay it with the beef into a basin lined with a good suet paste, about half an inch thick; throw in a little water and close over the top securely with paste. Let it boil three hours, and keep the saucepan well filled up all the time. A few mushrooms or oysters may be put into the pudding, and will be a very great improvement. Cost, rump steak, 1s. 3d. to 1s. 6d. per pound; kidney, 10d. Sufficient for three or four persons.
A classic steamed suet pudding, and the method holds up almost unchanged — the main thing the text leaves out is how to cover the basin and how much paste to make.
- The hinge: seal the top, and keep the pot filledThe pudding cooks by steam trapped inside the pastry, so the lid of paste must be pressed and pinched to the lining all the way round, then covered with pleated greaseproof paper and foil (or a floured cloth) tied under the rim. Top the pan up with boiling water as it drops; if it boils dry the basin cracks and the crust scorches.
- Suet paste, in quantitiesFor a basin of about 2 pints (a litre or so) — the size this much meat needs — use about 12 oz (350 g) self-raising flour to 6 oz (170 g) shredded suet, a teaspoon of salt and roughly 200 ml cold water — a soft, not sticky, dough. Two-thirds lines the basin, one-third makes the lid. Packet shredded beef suet or vegetable suet both work; block suet needs grating with flour.
- Boiling versus steaming"Let it boil three hours" means the basin sits in water. Immersing it to two-thirds up the side at a steady simmer is easier to manage than a rolling boil, and a covered steamer works equally well. Three hours as directed is enough; a further half hour gives more reliably tender beef.
- Preparing the kidneyBeef kidney needs its white core and membrane cut out, and it is far stronger in flavour than lamb's. Soaking the slices in cold salted water or milk for half an hour and draining them takes the edge off. Half a pound to a pound of steak is a generous proportion by modern taste; many modern recipes use nearer 4-6 oz.
- The cutRump is leaner than the cuts usually chosen for this pudding today. Chuck or shin, cut in ¾-inch dice, gives a better result over three hours; rump can go dry and stringy with that much wet heat.
- "A little water"About 4 tablespoons is right. The meat and kidney release a great deal of juice inside the sealed crust, and too much liquid at the start floods the basin and softens the pastry from within. Some cooks add a teaspoon of Worcestershire sauce or a splash of stout to it.
- The oystersA Victorian economy as much as a luxury — oysters were still relatively cheap for much of the century, though prices rose towards its end. If you use them, six shucked oysters added raw among the meat is plenty; they will be entirely cooked through by the end and contribute mostly savour. Mushrooms, quartered, are the easier option.
- Turning out and servingRest the pudding five minutes, run a knife round the rim and invert onto a warm deep dish. Cut a wedge from the top crust rather than slicing the whole thing, so the gravy stays in. Sufficient for three or four, as the book says, with potatoes and a green vegetable.
- The pricesThe costs quoted are pre-decimal: 1s. 3d. is fifteen pence in old money, not a modern figure. They are useful only as a ratio — kidney at 10d. a pound against rump at 15-18d. shows why offal padded out the dish.
Steak and kidney pudding belongs to the great nineteenth-century family of English boiled suet puddings, savoury and sweet, that made a fireplace or a single hob do the work of an oven. The suet crust is the older technology: puddings were boiled in cloths long before basins came into common use, and the shift to the pudding basin with a floured cloth tied over the top is generally traced to the earlier part of the 1800s. Kidney appears here for the same reason it appears throughout Cassell's — it was cheap, and stretching a pound of rump into a meal for four with half a pound of offal and a flour-and-suet crust was ordinary domestic arithmetic. The oysters are the period detail most likely to mislead a modern reader; through much of the Victorian era they were a working-class food, sold by the barrel, and adding a few to a meat pudding was thrift dressed as improvement rather than extravagance. Cassell's New Dictionary of Cookery, issued in the closing decades of the century, was aimed squarely at the household with one cook and a careful budget, which is why the price per pound is printed alongside the method.