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Peas Pudding, Superlative
Soak and boil a pint of peas according to the directions given above, press them through a sieve, season with pepper and salt, and beat thoroughly for eight or ten minutes, first adding three well-beaten eggs, two ounces of clarified butter, and a table-spoonful of thick cream. Pour the mixture into a buttered mould, which it should quite fill, cover with a floured cloth, plunge the mould into boiling water, and let the pudding boil quickly till done enough. Turn it out before serving, and send melted butter to table with it. Time, four hours. Probable cost, 10d. Sufficient for six or eight persons.
A boiled pease pudding of the old school, richer than most: eggs, butter and cream turn the usual coarse mash into something closer to a savoury custard. The method assumes you have already soaked and boiled the peas by the book's earlier directions.
- The peasA pint of dried split peas is roughly 1 lb / 450-500 g by imperial measure, and swells to a large quantity of cooked pulp. Yellow split peas are the traditional choice. Soak overnight, then simmer until collapsing, 45-60 minutes, before sieving.
- Sieve or processPressing through a sieve gives the smooth texture the recipe is after. A food mill or a few pulses in a processor does the same job in a fraction of the time, though the skins are better removed by sieving if you want it truly fine.
- The hinge: dry the pulpBoiled peas hold a great deal of water, and a wet pulp will not set with three eggs behind it. Return the sieved purée to a low pan and stir until it stiffens and pulls away from the sides before enriching it. This matters more than any timing in the recipe.
- Four hours is far too longFour hours is longer than this needs -- An egg-bound purée in a covered 1.5-litre mould should be set in 1 1/2 to 2 hours of steady simmering; beyond that the eggs tighten and weep. Test with a skewer, which should come out clean and hot.
- Mould and cloth"Quite fill" is deliberate, since there is no raising agent and air pockets cause it to break on turning out. A pudding basin covered with buttered foil and tied with string replaces the floured cloth, and standing the basin on a trivet in the pan keeps the base off direct heat.
- Clarified butterTwo ounces is 55 g. Ordinary melted butter works; clarifying was a keeping measure as much as a culinary one, and the milk solids will not spoil this pudding.
- Boil quicklyRead this as a confident simmer, not a rolling boil, and keep the water level topped up to two-thirds of the basin's height with boiling water from a kettle so the temperature never drops.
- ServingSix to eight portions as a side dish, traditionally with boiled salt pork, bacon or ham. The melted butter sent to table is the old sauce sense of the term: butter thickened with a little flour and water, not simply butter poured from a pan.
Pease pudding is one of the oldest surviving English boiled dishes, often linked to the old practice of cooking dried peas alongside salted meat, though the line of descent is uncertain and the pudding cloth itself came later, and it is still sold with ham and pork in the north-east of England. Cassell's calls this version "superlative" because it takes that plain labourer's pudding and pushes it upmarket with eggs, cream and clarified butter, a very Victorian move: the same technique, the same cheap pulse, but rebuilt as something a middle-class table could accept. The costing of 10d for six to eight people is the point of the entry as much as the flavour is, since dried peas were among the cheapest sources of protein available and the book's readers were expected to be counting. Its cross-reference to "the directions given above" points to a dictionary-style arrangement rather than a self-contained set piece.