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Kidney Pudding (another Way)
This pudding may also be made of mutton, veal, or lamb. Make the pastry s directed in the last recipe. Line a pudding-basin with it, and slice half a dozen kidneys. Season them with salt and cayenne, and sprinkle over them a dessert-spoonful of powdered herbs, of which two-thirds should be parsley and one-third thyme. Put them in the basin, pour over them two or three table-spoonfuls of good veal stock and a glassful of light wine; cover them with the crust, pinch in the edges securely, tie the pudding in a floured cloth, plunge it into boiling water, and keep it boiling quickly until it is cooked enough. Serve as hot as possible. Time to boil, three hours. Probable cost, 2s. Sufficient for four or five persons.
A boiled suet-crust pudding of the older sort, sealed in a floured cloth rather than foil. The recipe assumes you have just read the preceding one, so the crust and the basin need spelling out.
- The hinge: the water must never stop boilingA suet crust cooked at a bare simmer turns heavy and grey. Keep the pot at a rolling boil for the full three hours and top up with boiling water from a kettle, never cold, so the temperature does not drop.
- The pastry meant hereThe preceding recipe is not reproduced here; a boiled pudding crust of this sort is a suet crust, roughly 8 oz plain flour to 4 oz shredded beef suet, a pinch of salt and enough cold water to make a firm dough. Roll about a quarter inch thick, line a greased basin of about 2 pints, and keep a piece back for the lid.
- Cloth or coveringThe floured cloth is what keeps water out: scald it, flour the inside generously, tie it tight under the rim and knot the corners across the top. A pleated sheet of parchment under foil, with string, does the same job and is easier to secure. Either way the basin should sit on a trivet or folded cloth so it is not in direct contact with the pan base.
- Kidneys, by weight not by countHalf a dozen lamb kidneys is about 10-12 oz trimmed. Veal and mutton kidneys are much larger, so work to roughly 1 to 1.25 lb prepared meat. Split them, cut out the white core and fat, and strip the membrane; many cooks soak them 20-30 minutes in cold salted water or milk to soften the flavour.
- Powdered herbsDried, finely rubbed herbs. A dessert-spoonful is about 2 teaspoons, so roughly 1⅓ teaspoons dried parsley to ⅔ teaspoon dried thyme, following the recipe's two-thirds to one-third. If using fresh, treble the quantity.
- A glassful of light wineAn unfixed measure in Victorian books, but a wine glass of the period was about 2 to 2.5 fl oz. Use a scant quarter cup of dry white wine, or a little more if you like; with the two or three tablespoons of stock the filling should be moist, not swimming, or the liquid will lift the crust.
- CayenneA pinch, an eighth of a teaspoon or so, is plenty with modern ground cayenne.
- ServingSufficient for four or five, as stated. Rest the pudding a couple of minutes out of the cloth before turning out, and cut it at the table so the gravy is not lost. Probable cost of 2s. was a substantial sum, of the order of a day's wage for a poorly paid labourer at the time.
Boiled puddings with a suet crust and a savoury filling were a mainstay of British cooking, first tied as a solid ball in cloth and later, in the nineteenth century, made by lining a basin. Kidney appears in them constantly because it was cheap, plentiful in a butcher's shop that broke down whole carcasses, and rich enough to make its own gravy inside a sealed crust. The better-known steak and kidney pudding is the same idea with the proportions reversed; here the kidney carries the dish alone, which is why the parsley and thyme, the cayenne and the wine are all doing work to lift a strongly flavoured offal. Cassell's treats the recipe as one of a family of variations, offering mutton, veal or lamb interchangeably.