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PEAS PUDDING (another way)
Soak a pint of split peas overnight, and remove all that are not quite good. The following morning drain them, tie them in a thick cloth, leave room for swelling, and put them into a saucepan with plenty of soft cold water. If soft water cannot be obtained half a tea-spoonful of carbonate of soda should be stirred into that in which the peas are boiled. Boil until the peas are tender, then press them through a colander, stir an ounce of butter into the pulp, with a little pepper and salt, and, if liked, two well-beaten eggs. Beat the mixture thoroughly, tie it tightly in a cloth, and boil again for one hour. If the eggs are omitted the pudding will have to be served in a shape, as the eggs bind it together. If the peas are not soft at the end of two hours and a half they are of inferior quality, and cannot be made soft. One hour's boiling will be found sufficient for superior peas. Time, altogether, to boil, three hours and a half. Probable cost, 5d. Sufficient for half a dozen persons.
A boiled-cloth pudding of the old English kind, and one of the few that still repays the effort. The technique is dated but the seasoning logic is sound.
- A pint of split peasMeasured by volume, not weight: an imperial pint of dried split peas is roughly 14-16 oz, or 400-450 g. Yellow split peas are the traditional choice; green will work and taste sweeter.
- Soft water and the sodaCalcium and magnesium in hard water bind to the pea skins and keep them from breaking down. Half a teaspoon of bicarbonate of soda per pot corrects this. Do not increase it — more turns the pulp slimy and flattens the flavour.
- Salt and acid go in lateThe recipe seasons only after the peas are pulped, which is correct. Salt is largely harmless, but anything acidic — vinegar, tomato, stock with wine in it — added to the boiling water will markedly slow the softening of the peas.
- The pudding clothA tightly woven cotton or calico cloth, scalded and floured, tied loosely for the first boil and tightly for the second. A pudding basin with a pleated foil-and-paper lid does the same job with less fuss and less risk of the cloth admitting water.
- Timings are generousTimings -- Soaked split peas usually collapse in 45-60 minutes; the recipe itself allows one hour for superior peas and treats two and a half hours as the outside limit. Check at 45 minutes. The second boil is only there to set the eggs and firm the shape; 45 minutes to an hour is ample.
- Old peas will not softenThe warning is accurate and worth heeding. Dried peas that have sat for a year or more develop a hard-to-cook defect that no amount of boiling reverses. Buy from a shop with turnover.
- The eggs are structuralTwo beaten eggs bind the pulp so it slices. Leave them out and you have a purée that must be moulded and served from the shape, as the recipe says.
- ServingSix portions, and traditionally sent to table with boiled salt pork, bacon or a ham hock, whose cooking liquor can replace some of the water.
Pease pudding belongs to the long English tradition of the boiled cloth pudding, and behind that to pease pottage, the everyday thickened dried-pea dish of the medieval and early modern poor — the one behind the nursery rhyme, standardly recorded as "pease porridge hot, pease porridge cold, pease porridge in the pot nine days old." Dried field peas stored well, cost almost nothing, and supplied protein in households that ate meat rarely; the pudding survived the arrival of the potato most stubbornly in the North East of England, where it is still sold alongside ham and saveloys. Cassell's gives it twice, and costs it at fivepence for six people.