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Chicken and Rice Pudding
Cut the meat from the remains of a cold fowl, and take half its weight in ham. Free it from skin and gristle, and pound it in a mortar, with a little salt, white pepper, and pounded mace. To one pound of fowl, and half a pound of ham, allow a cupful of rice. Boil this in some nicely-flavoured stock till it is sufficiently cooked, then drain it, and add to it a cupful of new milk and the pounded meat. Stir these well together. Put the mixture into a buttered mould, dredge a little flour over the top, tie it in a floured cloth, and boil it for an hour, taking care that the water in the saucepan does not reach as high as the top of the mould. Serve with mushroom or oyster sauce. Probable cost, 6d., exclusive of the cold meat. Sufficient for six persons.
A Victorian way of stretching the last of a roast fowl into a second dinner: a savoury boiled pudding, closer to a quenelle mixture or a steamed forcemeat than to anything sweet. It works, but the cooking method needs translating.
- The hinge: keep water below the mouldThe instruction to keep the water below the top of the mould is the one that decides the dish. Set the covered mould on a trivet or folded cloth in a deep pan with water reaching two-thirds up the sides, and top up with boiling water as it evaporates. If water gets past the cloth the pudding turns to sodden paste.
- Steaming instead of a floured clothA buttered mould tied in a floured cloth was the usual seal before greaseproof paper. Buttered parchment and foil, crimped tightly under the rim, does the same job in a modern steamer or covered stockpot; an hour at a bare simmer is still right for a mixture of this size.
- "New milk"Simply fresh, unsoured whole milk. Whole milk is the equivalent; skimmed will give a looser, blander set.
- Pounded maceGround mace, the outer covering of the nutmeg, warmer and less resinous than nutmeg itself. A quarter teaspoon to this quantity of meat is plenty. Nutmeg substitutes at half the amount.
- The mortar, and the modern shortcutA food processor does in seconds what pounding in a mortar took many minutes to achieve, but pulse rather than run it — the aim is a coarse paste that still shows some texture, not a smooth emulsion.
- Ham and saltA pound of cooked fowl to half a pound of ham is a salty ratio by current standards, since Victorian ham was heavily cured. Taste the mixture before adding the "little salt", and consider unsmoked cooked ham or gammon.
- The riceA cupful of long-grain rice boiled in well-flavoured stock until tender, then drained; err on the soft side rather than leaving it al dente. Pudding rice or short-grain gives a stickier, better-bound result.
- Sauce and yieldSix portions as stated, though as a modern main course it serves four. Oyster sauce of the period was generally a white sauce enriched with oysters and their liquor, and mushroom sauce was made both white and brown — the pudding is mild and needs a sauce with some body; a thin gravy will not carry it.
Savoury boiled and steamed puddings were the backbone of English cookery in the second half of the nineteenth century, and Cassell's treats this one as a way of using up cold meat rather than as a sweet. The costing — sixpence "exclusive of the cold meat" — is the whole point of the entry. A household that had roasted a fowl on Sunday was expected to account for every scrap of it, and the pounding mortar, common in kitchens of the period, was the tool that made scraps into something that could be sent to table in a shape. The pairing of fowl with ham and mace runs through the period's forcemeats, potted meats and raised pies, and the mould-and-cloth technique is the same one used for boiled batter and suet puddings; only the filling changed. Cassell's Dictionary of Cookery, generally described as issued in parts from the 1870s and revised for decades after, seems to have been aimed at exactly this reader: middle-class, one servant or none, and answerable for the week's expenditure.