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Herb Pudding or Pie
Take two handfuls of parsley-leaves, one of spinach, one of mustard-and-cress, one of white beet-leaves, one of finely-sliced lettuce-hearts, three or four leaves of borage, and a dozen chives. Wash these herbs well, and boil them for three or four minutes. Drain the water from them, chop them small, season with salt and pepper, and spread them in a buttered dish. Make a batter with five table-spoonfuls of flour and a pinch of salt, mixed smoothly with two eggs and as much milk as will bring it to the consistency of thick cream. Pour this over the herbs, stir all well together, and bake in a moderate oven. If liked, the edges of the dish can be lined with good pastry. Sufficient for five or six persons. Probable cost, 8d.
HERBS AND SPICES, AROMATIC SEASONING OF. (See AROMATIC SEASONING OF HERBS AND SPICES.)
A batter pudding built on a mound of spring greens, closer to a crustless clafoutis or a Yorkshire-pudding batter than to anything sweet. The original assumes you know the oven and the timing, so both need filling in.
- The oven"A moderate oven" is conventionally read today as about 350F/180C, though the book gives no temperatures. Give it 35 to 45 minutes, until the batter is set through the centre and lightly browned at the edges; if you line the dish with pastry, expect closer to 50 minutes and consider blind-baking the crust first so it does not go soft under the wet greens.
- How much is a handfulThere is no fixed conversion. Read it as a loosely packed cup or so of leaves per handful, roughly 1 oz/30 g each before wilting; the recipe calls for six handfuls in all, so about 6 oz of raw greens plus the borage and chives. Weigh the parsley if anything: two handfuls of it is assertive, and half that is more comfortable for most palates.
- White beet-leavesThese are the leaves of white-stemmed beet, which is to say chard. Use Swiss chard leaves with the thick ribs stripped out, or substitute more spinach.
- Mustard-and-cressThe Victorian salad staple of mustard and garden cress seedlings, sold in punnets and cut with scissors. Microgreens or the peppery cress sold in supermarket tubs are the direct equivalent; watercress leaves work, though they are stronger.
- BorageThree or four leaves only, and that is deliberate: borage is faintly cucumber-flavoured but the older leaves are bristly. Use young ones, chop them fine, and skip them rather than substituting if you cannot find any.
- The blanchingThree or four minutes is enough to collapse the leaves and take the raw edge off the mustard and parsley. Drain hard and squeeze the chopped greens dry in a cloth, or the batter will not set and the pudding will weep.
- The batterFive tablespoons of flour is about 1.5 oz/45 g, so this is a thin, eggy batter rather than a cake mixture. Two eggs plus enough milk to reach thick-cream consistency comes to roughly 1/2 to 2/3 cup / 120-160 ml. Season it as well as the greens.
- Yield and servingFive or six as a side dish, three or four as a light supper. It is best warm rather than hot, with butter or a slice of bacon or ham; the probable cost is given as 8d.
Herb puddings belong to an old British tradition of cooking spring greens into something substantial at the point in the year when the garden had leaves but not much else, and the household still had flour, eggs and milk. Northern versions such as Easter-ledge or dock pudding leaned on wild bistort and were bound with oatmeal or barley; this Cassell's version is the polite garden-plot form, using cultivated parsley, chard, lettuce hearts and a handful of mustard-and-cress. The presence of borage and chives is often taken as an echo of much earlier English cookery, where a "herb" meant any leaf you ate rather than a pinch of seasoning, and green pies stuffed with mixed pot-herbs appear in recipe collections for centuries before this one. The pastry lining offered at the end is what turns the pudding into the pie of the title, and the eightpence quoted is the point of the entry: a dish for five or six people made almost entirely from what was already growing.