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Chicken and Macaroni Pudding
Boil three ounces of pipe macaroni in some nicely-flavoured stock till it is tender but unbroken. Prepare the meat as in the next recipe, allowing six ounces of ham and six ounces of chicken to three ounces of macaroni. Mix them well together, and add a well-beaten egg, and a piece of butter about the size of an egg. Pour the mixture into a buttered mould, tie it in a cloth, boil or steam it, and when ready serve it as hot as possible. Time to boil, one hour. Probable cost, 6d., exclusive of the cold meat. Sufficient for four persons.
A Victorian way of turning leftover cooked chicken and ham into a moulded steamed pudding. The technique is sound; the vocabulary and the vessels are what need translating.
- "Pipe macaroni"Straight hollow tubes, roughly what we would buy as ziti or large elbow macaroni. Three ounces dry is about three-quarters of a cup; cook it in stock rather than water, as directed, since it is the main carrier of flavour in the dish.
- Cook the macaroni short"Tender but unbroken" means stopping a minute or two before you normally would. It will absorb more liquid and continue softening through the hour of steaming, and overcooked tubes collapse into paste in the mould.
- The meatThe cross-reference is to a neighbouring recipe not reproduced here, presumably a preparation of cold cooked chicken and ham. Six ounces of each, already cooked, plus the three ounces of macaroni; the costing "exclusive of the cold meat" confirms this is a leftovers dish rather than one built from raw meat.
- "A piece of butter about the size of an egg"Two ounces, or four tablespoons. A standard Victorian shorthand.
- Seasoning is left to youThe recipe as written adds nothing but egg and butter. Salt, pepper and a little grated nutmeg or mace are the seasonings commonly found in period ham and chicken forcemeats, and the dish is flat without them.
- Mould and clothA pudding basin or charlotte mould, well buttered. Instead of tying a cloth over and around the mould as directed, cover with buttered parchment and foil, pleated and tied under the rim, then set on a trivet in a covered pan of simmering water reaching halfway up the basin.
- TimeOne hour of steady simmering is right for a basin of this size, and there is no food-safety pressure since the meat is already cooked. Judge it by feel: the pudding should be set firm enough to hold its shape when turned out.
- ServingRest five minutes before unmoulding, or it will slump. Four servings as written, and it wants a sauce -- a plain velouté, or the stock the macaroni was cooked in thickened and enriched -- because on its own it is a dry dish.
Steamed and boiled savoury puddings in moulds were a standard part of the English repertoire when Cassell's was compiled, and this one belongs to the great Victorian category of dishes designed to use up cold roast meat without simply serving it cold again. Macaroni had by then been familiar in English kitchens for a long time, usually treated as an economical bulking starch or a base for cheese sauce rather than as Italian cooking; boiling it in flavoured stock, as here, was often recommended as a way to keep it from tasting of nothing. The "probable cost, 6d., exclusive of the cold meat" is characteristic of the book's method -- it costs out only the fresh ingredients, on the assumption that the chicken and ham are already sitting in the larder and represent no new expense at all.