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MUTTON BOUDINS (Invalid Cookery)
Required: A quarter of a pound of lean meat (shredded), two table-spoonfuls of fine bread-crumbs, one table-spoonful of boiled rice, or macaroni cut in rings, one egg, and a little stock (a few spoonfuls will be sufficient). The ingredients are best mixed in a mortar, the egg and the stock being added to form a moist paste. They are lighter if the white of the egg is beaten and stirred in last. Three-fourths fill little moulds (dariole or others), buttered lightly. Cover with buttered paper; and poach in a shallow pan of simmering water until done (for twenty minutes or more). Wipe the grease off; and turn out on to a bed of vegetables, rice, etc., or as the case demands. A very good invalid dish. Sherry improves for some tastes.
A small poached meat pudding from the invalid-cookery section, built on the same principle as a quenelle: pounded lean meat lightened with egg and steamed gently so it stays tender. The whole thing is a single portion.
- The hinge: gentle heat onlyThe water in the pan should shiver, not boil. A rolling boil drives the egg protein to contract and squeezes the moisture out, leaving the boudins dry and honeycombed rather than smooth.
- Mortar or processorA food processor does in thirty seconds what the mortar did in ten minutes. Pulse the trimmed raw meat to a fine paste first, then add crumbs, rice and yolk, and keep the bowl cold so the mixture does not warm and separate.
- Dariole mouldsSmall straight-sided metal moulds of roughly 3 fl oz (90 ml). Ramekins, timbale moulds or a non-stick muffin tin all work. Butter them well and fill only three-quarters, as the beaten white makes the mixture rise.
- Buttered paperCut rounds of parchment, butter one side and lay them butter-side down on each mould. This is a lid, not a wrapping; it keeps condensation off the surface. Foil over the whole pan does the same job.
- Mutton and its substitutesMutton — sheep generally reckoned at over a year, traditionally over two — is scarce outside specialist butchers. Lean leg of lamb behaves the same way and is milder; the recipe as written would also take chicken or veal.
- Timing and donenessTwenty to twenty-five minutes at a bare simmer is right for 3 fl oz moulds. They are done when the centre feels set and springy, or reads 165F (74C); a boudin that is still slack in the middle needs another five minutes.
- Stock quantity"A few spoonfuls" is vague because the crumbs vary. Add stock a spoonful at a time until the paste drops heavily from the spoon but holds its shape — usually two to three tablespoons.
- Yield and servingA quarter-pound of meat gives two or three small moulds: one invalid's serving, or a first course for two. Turn out on rice or a puree, and moisten with a spoonful of reduced stock, since the boudins have no sauce of their own.
- The sherryThe recipe says only that sherry 'improves for some tastes'; a teaspoon of dry sherry can be stirred into the paste. Wine in the sickroom was regarded as much as a stimulant as a seasoning.
Invalid cookery occupies its own department in late Victorian household manuals because feeding the sick was a domestic duty with its own rules: food had to be nourishing, finely divided, bland enough for a weak stomach, and above all small in quantity, since the great fear was food left uneaten and the tray sent back untouched. Boudin is simply French for pudding or sausage, and in professional kitchens of the period a boudin was a forcemeat of pounded meat and panada poached in a mould — the same family as the quenelle and the mousseline. Cassell's has taken that restaurant technique and shrunk it to a single portion, which is characteristic of the book's approach: the invalid was to be given properly made food, not gruel. The mortar was the essential tool, and the digestibility of pounded meat was an article of faith in nineteenth-century dietetics, on the reasoning that the cook's pestle did work the patient's stomach was too weak to do.