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Pork Pudding
Line a well-buttered basin with good suet crust. Fill it with alternate layers of pork cut into neat slices and pork sausage-meat, and allow double the weight of pork to that of sausage-meat. Put a little pepper and salt, a chopped onion, and half a dozen sage-leaves, finely shredded, with the meat, and add two or three spoonfuls of gravy made from the trimmings. Put on the cover, fasten the edges securely, tie the pudding in a floured cloth, plunge it into boiling water, and keep it boiling until it is done enough; then turn it out carefully, and serve on a hot dish. Time to boil a moderate-sized pudding, about three hours. Probable cost, pork and pork sausage, 10d. per pound.
A boiled suet-crust pudding of the kind that once did duty as a whole dinner. The instructions assume you already know how to line a basin and keep a pot boiling for three hours; the details below are the ones the book leaves out.
- The water must never stop boilingA suet crust set in barely simmering water goes heavy and greasy instead of light. Keep the pot at a full rolling boil for the whole three hours and top up with boiling water from a kettle, never cold, so the temperature does not drop.
- Basin size and yieldThe book does not define a "moderate-sized pudding"; a basin of about 1.5 to 2 pints (roughly 850 ml to 1.1 litres) suits the three-hour boiling time and would serve about four. On that scale, roughly 1 lb of pork slices to 8 oz of sausage-meat keeps the two-to-one ratio the recipe gives.
- Suet crustThe standard proportion is 8 oz self-raising flour (or plain flour with 2 tsp baking powder) to 4 oz shredded suet, a good pinch of salt, and enough cold water to make a soft dough. Beef suet is traditional; vegetable suet behaves much the same. Roll it about a quarter-inch thick, line the buttered basin, and reserve a third for the lid.
- Which porkUse shoulder or belly rather than loin or leg. Three hours of boiling renders lean cuts dry and stringy, while the fat and connective tissue in shoulder turn silky. Cut the slices thin, no more than a quarter-inch, so they cook through evenly.
- Sausage-meatVictorian pork sausage-meat was usually plainly seasoned, most often with pepper and salt and frequently sage, with mace or nutmeg in some receipts. Skinned good-quality butcher's sausages work; skip any heavily herbed or chilli-spiked variety, since the pudding already carries onion and sage.
- Gravy, and how much"Two or three spoonfuls" is most likely tablespoons, and the quantity is small either way. A boiled pudding generates a good deal of liquid from the meat itself, so extra stock risks flooding the dish when you turn it out. Simmering the trimmings and bones for half an hour gives the small quantity needed.
- Sealing and coveringDamp the edge of the crust before pressing the lid on, then cover the basin with pleated greaseproof paper and foil before the floured cloth, which the original assumes as the only barrier. Tie the string under the rim and make a loop across the top as a handle.
- Doneness"Until it is done enough" is not a useful test with pork. Three hours will do it for a basin this size, but check that the centre of the filling reaches 71C (160F) with an instant-read thermometer pushed through the crust.
- Turning outLet the pudding stand five minutes off the heat before unmoulding, and lift the cloth and paper before inverting. Serve with a jug of the remaining gravy and something sharp on the side, mustard or a spoonful of apple, to cut the suet.
Boiled puddings in a cloth were the workhorse of the English kitchen from the seventeenth century onward, the basin pudding being a substantially later development, and a savoury one filled with pork, onion and sage is essentially a pork pie translated into suet crust and a pot of water rather than pastry and an oven, which mattered a great deal in households cooking over an open fire with no reliable oven at all. The sage-and-onion seasoning is the same combination used in pork stuffing and in the sausages of the period, and reflects the long-standing English pairing of sage with pig, a match generally explained by sage's ability to cut through fat. Cassell's habit of closing each entry with a "probable cost" was aimed squarely at the mistress of a middling household budgeting by the pound: pork and sausage-meat came in at 10d. a pound, and stretching it with a flour-and-suet crust made the meat go further still.