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PEAS PUDDING (Dr. Kitchener's recipe)
"Put a quart of split peas into a clean cloth; do not tie them up too close, but leave a little room for them to swell; put them on to boil in cold water slowly till they are tender; if they are good peas they will be boiled enough in about two hours and a half; rub them through a sieve into a deep disl:, adding to them an egg or two, an ounce of butter, and some pepper and salt; beat these ingredients well together for about ten minutes, and when they are thoroughly incorporated flour the cloth well, put the pudding in, tie it up as tightly as possible, and boil it an hour longer. It is as good with boiled beef as it is with boiled pork; and why not with roasted pork? This is a very good accompaniment to cold pork or cold beef." To increase the bulk and diminish the expense of this pudding, the economical housekeeper who has a large family to feed may add to the above ingredients two pounds of potatoes that have been boiled and well mashed. To many this mixture is more agreeable than peas pudding alone.
A cloth-boiled pease pudding of the old English kind, the standard companion to boiled salt beef and pork. Nothing here is difficult, but the cloth work and the two-stage boil need explaining.
- A quart of split peasMeasured dry by volume, that is roughly 1 3/4 to 2 lb of yellow split peas, a quantity meant for a large table. Halve everything for a domestic quantity.
- The pudding clothA square of unbleached calico or a doubled square of muslin, scalded and wrung out, is the traditional vessel. For the first boil the peas go in loose with slack tying so they can swell; for the second the cloth is floured and tied hard, since the flour and the tight tie together form the skin that holds the pudding's shape.
- SoakingKitchiner assumes nothing, but modern split peas cook far more evenly after a few hours in cold water. He also starts them in cold water and brings them up slowly, which is right: a hard boil bursts the skins and clouds everything.
- Two and a half hours is generousModern split peas will usually be soft well inside that, perhaps an hour to an hour and a half, sooner if soaked. Judge by the peas collapsing, not the clock.
- Hard water and saltVery hard water can keep pulses stubbornly firm; a pinch of bicarbonate in the cooking water fixes it. Salt in the seasoning stage only, as he does.
- Rubbing through a sieveA drum sieve and wooden mushroom was the period tool. A food mill on the fine plate does the same job in a fraction of the time.
- The ten minutes of beatingThis is the hinge. Egg, butter and beating are what turn a wet purée into something that will set and slice; if the mixture is loose and steaming, let it cool a little before the eggs go in so they do not scramble.
- Instead of a clothA well-buttered pudding basin covered with pleated paper and foil and steamed gives much the same result with less anxiety about the tie, though a basin usually needs longer than the hour given for the cloth.
- The potato variantTwo pounds of boiled mashed potato adds appreciably to the bulk and softens the flavour. Mash it dry and floury, or the pudding will not hold together.
Dr. Kitchener is William Kitchiner, the London writer on cookery, who held a medical degree though he is generally understood not to have practised, and an optician besides, whose The Cook's Oracle (first published 1817) was one of the best-selling English cookery books of the century and was still being quarried by compilers like Cassell's decades later; the chatty asides here, including the aside about roast pork, are entirely characteristic of his style. Pease pudding itself is far older than the book, a survival of the early modern habit of boiling dried pulses in a cloth alongside the meat in the same pot, so that one fire and one copper produced both dish and accompaniment. Its association with boiled salt pork and beef is northern English above all, and it remains a fixture in the North East today. The closing note about potatoes and a large family strikes a note common in the Victorian household-manual trade: dried peas were among the cheapest sources of protein available to a working household, and stretching them further with potato cost almost nothing.