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Meat Roll Puddings
Make a plain suet pastry, roll it out to the thickness of half an inch; allow two pounds of pastry to one pound of meat. Take a mixture of beef and kidney, finely minced, and season with salt, black pepper, and nutmeg. A small onion or a few mushrooms, minced, should also be added. Spread this mixture over the crust, and roll up; tie in a cloth, and boil for two and a half to three hours.
A roly-poly in the savoury direction: suet crust spread with minced beef and kidney, rolled, wrapped and boiled. Nothing here is difficult, but the wrapping and the water level decide whether it succeeds.
- The hinge: seal and wrap looselyDamp the pastry edges, pinch the long seam and both ends firmly, then wrap with the seam upward. Suet crust swells considerably, so leave a fold of slack in the wrapping or the roll splits and the juices leach into the water.
- Cloth, or its modern replacementA traditional pudding cloth is scalded, wrung out and dusted with flour before the roll goes on it. Pleated parchment with a foil layer over it, tied at both ends, does the same job and is easier to handle. Either way the parcel goes into water already at a steady simmer, not a hard boil.
- Water, or a steamerIf the roll is boiled, keep it fully submerged and top up with boiling water as it drops; cold water added mid-cook makes the crust heavy. A covered steamer over simmering water for the same three hours gives a lighter result and no risk of a leak flooding the pudding.
- Suet pastry proportionsThe book says only 'plain suet pastry' and leaves the proportions to the reader. A common working crust is two parts flour to one part shredded suet by weight, a good pinch of salt, a teaspoon of baking powder if you like it lighter, and cold water to a soft but not sticky dough. Beef suet is sold shredded and boxed; frozen grated butter or vegetable shortening will work, though the crumb is shorter and less springy.
- Two pounds of pastry to one of meatThat is a Victorian ratio, built to make a pound of meat feed a family. Reversing it -- a pound of crust to a pound and a half of filling -- gives a pudding closer to modern expectations, at the cost of a thinner, more fragile casing.
- The kidneyUse ox or lamb kidney, halved, with the white core and any membrane cut away, and rinse it well. Kidney is strongly flavoured and a quarter of the meat weight is plenty; more will dominate.
- Mince it fine, and keep it moistCoarse chunks will not cook through in a sealed roll, and dry mince makes a dull pudding. Mix in two or three tablespoons of cold water or stock with the seasoning; it turns to gravy inside the crust.
- Timing and yieldTwo and a half to three hours is right for a roll of this size, and the suet needs the full time to become tender -- this is not a case where less will do. A roll made with two pounds of pastry and a pound of meat serves six to eight, cut into thick slices, with gravy served separately.
Suet pudding in a cloth was one of the great engines of the English kitchen: it needed no oven, only a pot already on the fire, which suited houses where baking meant a trip to the bakery or a single hot day a week. The savoury roll is a cousin of the sweet roly-poly and of the more famous steak and kidney pudding, which uses the same crust lining a basin rather than rolled around the filling. Beef and kidney together were a matter of economy as much as taste -- kidney was cheap offal that stretched the more expensive steak and gave the gravy body and depth. Cassell's Dictionary of Cookery was compiled in the later nineteenth century for exactly that reader, a competent household cook working without much equipment and with an eye on the butcher's bill.