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Bread and Meat Pudding, Portable
Make a bread dough, roll out the paste thick, and put any kind of fat meat, seasoned according to taste, upon it; wrap it over, and bake or boil as may be most convenient. This mode of cooking is particularly adapted for travellers or colonial life. Any kind of game, poultry, or meat may be stuffed, and, if well skewered before the paste is put around it, will be a convenient dish of bread, meat, and sauce combined, as they may first be cooked at home, and afterwards warmed for use when required.
This is a method rather than a formula: bread dough wrapped around seasoned meat and either baked or boiled. The instructions assume you already know how to make a loaf, so the useful work is in filling the gaps the original leaves.
- The hinge: cook the filling firstA thick bread crust insulates whatever is inside it, so raw meat at the centre will not reach a safe temperature before the outside is dark. Roast or braise the meat, cool it, then wrap it. Note that the original does the opposite: it skewers the meat and puts the paste around it raw, then bakes or boils.
- "Paste" means the doughIn period usage paste covers any rolled dough or pastry. Here it is ordinary bread dough after its first rise; the original says only to roll it 'thick', and about half an inch works — roll it thinner and the seams split as the loaf expands.
- Oven temperatureBake at 400F for the first 15 minutes to set the crust, then 350F until the base sounds hollow — roughly 45 minutes to an hour for a parcel the size of a small chicken.
- If you boil itBoiling a dough parcel requires a floured pudding cloth tied firmly, or the crust waterlogs and disintegrates. Two hours at a steady simmer in a covered pot, water kept topped up. Baking generally gives a better crust, though the original treats the two as equally acceptable.
- "Fat meat"The fat is structural, not incidental: it bastes the crumb from inside. Belly pork, lamb shoulder, duck legs or well-marbled beef work; modern lean chicken breast will leave the interior dry and the crust pale.
- Seasoning "according to taste"Season more heavily than you would a plated roast. Bread absorbs salt and the parcel is eaten cold or barely warm, which flattens flavour. Salt, pepper, thyme or sage, and a spoonful of stock or dripping poured in before sealing supplies the "sauce" the recipe promises.
- Keeping itThe original recommends this for travellers who will warm it up later, which meant days at ambient temperature. Cooked meat in a sealed crust is exactly the conditions to avoid; refrigerate it and eat within two days, or freeze the baked parcel.
- YieldA parcel made from a 1 lb batch of dough around 1 1/2 lb of cooked meat feeds four to six as a main course.
This entry belongs to a small class of Victorian recipes written for people about to leave the country. "Colonial life" in a Victorian household dictionary meant emigrants to Australia, Canada, South Africa or India, and cookery books of the period routinely added notes on provisioning a voyage, cooking over open fires, and food that would survive without an ice-house. The technique itself is much older than the colonial framing: enclosing meat in a flour crust to protect it during long cooking and carrying goes back to the medieval "coffin" pastry, and survives in the Cornish pasty and the raised pork pie. What is distinctive here is the use of leavened bread dough rather than a suet or hot-water crust, which turns the wrapper into the bread ration as well as the container one hand, as the text says, and no plate needed."