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Meal Puddings, in Skins
See that the skins are well washed. Let them soak for twelve hours in salt and water, then fill them, as for ox-blood puddings, allowing room for swelling. Make a stuffing of two pounds of good sifted oatmeal, one pound and a half of finely-shredded suet, a large onion, or two middle-sized ones, minced, pepper and salt, and a little allspice. Boil, but do not put them into quite boiling water. Time, about thirty-five minutes. Probable cost, 1s. 9d. Sufficient for twenty-four skins.
This is the Scottish mealie or white pudding: oatmeal, suet and onion in a casing, boiled rather than fried. The recipe assumes you have just butchered an animal and are working through the whole of it, so the quantities and the casing preparation both need translating.
- The skins"Skins" here are cleaned hog or sheep intestines. Modern natural casings come packed in salt and need only a rinse and a 30-60 minute soak in warm water, not the twelve-hour salt-and-water soak specified for casings straight from the butchering. Hog casings (32-35 mm) suit this filling; sheep casings give a thinner pudding that cooks faster.
- The hinge: fill loosely"Allowing room for swelling" is the whole trick. Oatmeal absorbs water and expands considerably, and a tightly packed pudding will burst in the pot. Fill to about two-thirds and tie off; prick each pudding once or twice with a needle before it goes in the water.
- "Not quite boiling""Not quite boiling" — The instruction governs how the puddings go in: start them in hot but not boiling water rather than dropping them into a rolling boil, which splits casings and drives the suet out. The book gives no temperature; in practice a gentle simmer answers. The stated thirty-five minutes suits puddings of the size implied; thinner sheep-casing puddings will be done sooner.
- Oatmeal"Good sifted oatmeal" means dry pinhead or medium-ground oatmeal, not rolled oats and not the instant sort. Rolled oats turn pasty. Toasting the meal in a dry pan first is traditional in Scotland and improves the flavour.
- SuetFresh beef or mutton suet from a butcher, chopped or coarsely grated. Packaged shredded suet, which is dusted with flour, will work but gives a slightly heavier result. The 4:3 ratio of meal to fat by weight looks generous and is not a misprint; the fat is what keeps the pudding from being dry.
- Scale and yieldTwo pounds of meal and a pound and a half of suet is stated as enough for twenty-four skins, so each pudding is small — roughly a 2 oz portion of filling. Quartering the recipe gives six puddings and is a more reasonable domestic batch.
- Cost note1s. 9d. is pre-decimal British currency, about 21 old pence for the whole batch of twenty-four — a marker of how cheap oatmeal and butcher's offcuts were, not a figure that converts usefully.
- ServingThe book gives no serving note. These are boiled, cooled and then reheated: sliced and fried in a little dripping, or simmered again for ten minutes and eaten with mashed potato and turnip.
Meal pudding is the plain end of a family of oatmeal sausages found across Scotland and the north of England, where the white or mealie pudding stands opposite the blood pudding — note that Cassell's sends the cook back to its own ox-blood pudding entry for the filling technique. The logic is thrift: intestines, suet and the cheapest grain in the country, combined to make something that keeps for days and can be fried up at speed. Cassell's New Dictionary of Cookery, a late-Victorian household compendium, prints it in the reference register it applies to everything, with a cost in shillings and pence and a yield in skins rather than in servings, because the reader was expected to be provisioning a household rather than cooking a single dinner. The dish survives today largely in Scottish chip shops, battered and deep-fried, and in the mealie pudding sold alongside black pudding by butchers there.