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Lentil Pudding
Take three ounces of fresh lentil flour and two ounces of cornflour, and blend them with a quarter of a pint of milk. Boil a pint of milk and add it to the flour and milk, along with salt, pepper, and powdered herbs to taste. When the mixture is cool whisk in two eggs. Boil for a couple of hours, and serve with a plain white sauce.
A savoury boiled pudding of the plain, economical sort Cassell's used to demonstrate starch cookery. The method is closer to a thick set custard than to a suet pudding, and it stands or falls on how the eggs go in.
- The hinge: let it cool before the eggsThe instruction to whisk the eggs in when the mixture is cool is worth following. Beaten into a very hot starch paste they can set in threads, and the pudding turns grainy rather than smooth. Blood heat is a safe point to add them.
- Imperial measuresA pint here is the imperial 20 fl oz, and a quarter pint is 5 fl oz. In American terms that is 2 1/2 cups of milk to boil and a scant 2/3 cup to make the slurry.
- CornflourBritish cornflour is American cornstarch, not cornmeal. Two ounces is a scant 1/2 cup, and it does much of the setting work alongside the eggs; the lentil flour is there for flavour and body.
- Lentil flourSold today as lentil flour or red lentil flour in health-food and South Asian shops; besan (gram flour, from chana dal) behaves similarly but tastes stronger. "Fresh" probably signalled flour that had not sat long enough to go stale or musty, so buy in small quantities and smell before using.
- Cook the starch outAdding the boiling milk to the slurry may not fully thicken it. If it stays thin you can return the whole thing to the pan and stir over moderate heat for two or three minutes, until it thickens and loses the raw, chalky taste of uncooked pulse flour.
- "Boil for a couple of hours"This almost certainly means a covered, greased pudding basin standing in simmering water rather than the mixture loose in a pan. Cover with pleated parchment and foil, keep the water at a bare simmer halfway up the basin, and top it up as it goes. Two hours seems generous for a mixture this size; test earlier with a skewer.
- Season harder than you thinkLentil flour and cornflour are both bland and milk mutes salt. The "powdered herbs" would have been dried thyme, sage, marjoram or a savoury mix; a teaspoon of dried herbs, a good half-teaspoon of salt and plenty of pepper is a reasonable starting point. Taste the mixture before the eggs go in.
- Yield and servingEnough for about four as a light supper dish or a vegetable course. The white sauce is the plain butter, flour and milk kind, without the onion infusion of a full bechamel.
This recipe belongs to a distinctly Victorian enthusiasm for pulses as a cheap substitute for meat protein. Lentil flour was widely sold in Britain in the second half of the nineteenth century, most famously as the patent invalid food Revalenta Arabica, marketed at high prices as a cure for a long list of complaints and revealed by chemists to be little more than ground lentils; the same flour turned up in vegetarian cookery and in institutional catering. A boiled savoury pudding of this kind, set with cornflour and served with white sauce, is the plain end of that tradition: filling, bland by design, and cheap enough to feed a household on the price of a few eggs.