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Fish Pudding
Pound in a mortar the flesh of two raw haddocks, cleared from skin and bone, pass it through a sieve, mixing a very little good gravy with it. Pound also an onion, a little parsley, a few bread-crumbs, and a quarter of a pound of veal suet; moisten with a couple of eggs, and season with pepper and salt. Beat these ingredients well into the pounded fish. When well mixed, boil the pudding in a mould, and send to table with a rich brown sauce. Eel pudding, with the addition of oysters, is excellent. It may be boiled in paste, and served with a sauce in the dish, or boiled in a mould and served with sauce in a tureen. Time, one hour to boil. Probable cost, 1s. each.
A Victorian fish farce, steamed in a mould and sauced. It converts easily to a food processor, but the proportions are the part to watch: the fish is the body, the suet and crumbs are the structure.
- Quantities, spelled outTwo haddocks might give anywhere from about 1.5 lb to 3 lb of skinned, boned flesh, depending on their size. Against roughly 2 lb of fish you want the quarter pound of suet, about a cup of soft breadcrumbs, one small onion, two tablespoons parsley and two eggs. The "very little good gravy" is best read as two or three tablespoons of well-flavoured stock, no more, or the mixture may not set.
- Mortar to processorPound the fish in a food processor in short pulses until it is a smooth paste, then push it through a sieve if you want the fine texture the original intends. Over-processing warms the mixture and makes it grainy; keep the fish cold throughout.
- Veal suetShredded veal suet is effectively unobtainable now. Beef suet is the usual substitute and is sold shredded; cold unsalted butter, grated on a coarse grater, gives a milder result closer to a modern fish mousseline.
- "Boil the pudding in a mould"Period practice covered both immersing the closed mould in boiling water and standing it in water to steam; steaming is the easier modern reading. Butter a pudding basin or mould, fill it two-thirds, cover tightly with buttered paper and foil, and stand it in a pan of gently boiling water reaching halfway up the sides.
- Time and donenessOne hour suits a mould of about a quart. Test with a skewer or thermometer: the centre should reach 160F and come out clean. Undercooked in the middle, a fish pudding is unpleasantly pasty rather than dangerous, but it will not turn out of the mould.
- Boiled in pasteThe alternative is to line the basin with suet crust and steam the filling inside it, in the manner of a steak pudding. The original still gives only one hour, but a crust will probably want longer -- allow up to two hours and test.
- The eel and oyster variantIf following the eel version, add the oysters whole and raw to the mixture at the last moment. They cook through in the steaming; chopping them or pre-poaching them makes them rubbery.
- The sauce"Rich brown sauce" here is a reduced brown stock thickened with a little roux and finished with butter. It matters more than it sounds: the pudding itself is deliberately plain, and a thin or dull sauce leaves the dish flat.
- YieldA quart mould serves four to six as a main course with potatoes, or six to eight as a first course cut in slices.
Fish pudding of this kind sits at the domestic end of a very old professional technique: the farce or forcemeat, in which flesh is pounded to a paste, bound with fat, crumbs and egg, and reshaped. In grand kitchens the same mixture became quenelles poached to order; in a Victorian household it went into a buttered basin, was steamed over the range for an hour and turned out whole. The entry teaches a ratio as much as a dish, which is why it pivots so casually into eel with oysters. The choice of haddock reflects a cheap and widely available fish, and the costing of a shilling apiece marks it as an economical dinner dish rather than a luxury. The habit of eating pounded fish as a moulded pudding faded in Britain over the twentieth century but survived robustly in Scandinavia, where fiskepudding is still sold ready-made.