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Sausage Pudding
Line a moderate-sized pudding-basin with good suet crust; fill it with one pound of fresh pork sausages which have been scalded and have had the skins removed, and pour over them a sauce made as follows. Mince an onion, and fry it with two sage-leaves in butter till the onion begins to turn yellow. Dredge a dessert-spoonful of flour over it, and pour upon it two or three table-spoonfuls of good stock. Stir the sauce over the fire till it boils, season with salt and cayenne, let it cool, and strain it over the sausages. Cover the pudding with a piece of the pastry with which the dish was lined. Tie it in a pudding-cloth, plunge it into boiling water, and boil quickly till the pudding is done enough. Turn it upon a hot dish, and send brown gravy to table with it. Time to boil the pudding, an hour and a half. Probable cost, sausages, 1s. per pound.
A boiled suet pudding of the plain Victorian sort: pastry-lined basin, sausagemeat, a small onion-and-sage sauce. Most of what needs translating is the crust and the boiling method.
- Suet crust proportionsCassell's assumes the cook knows it: roughly 8 oz self-raising flour (or plain flour with 2 tsp baking powder) to 4 oz shredded suet, a good pinch of salt, and cold water to a soft but not sticky dough. Two-thirds lines the basin, one-third makes the lid.
- Basin size and yieldA "moderate-sized pudding-basin" is not defined; something in the region of 1.5 to 2 pints would suit a pound of sausages, and the pudding would serve about four as a main course.
- Scalding the sausagesDropping them into simmering water for a minute or two firms the meat enough that the skins slip off cleanly. It is a peeling technique, not cooking — the sausages go into the crust essentially raw.
- Cool the sauce before it goes inThe instruction to let the sauce cool matters. Hot liquid poured onto raw suet pastry starts melting the fat out of the lining before the pudding is sealed, and the crust turns heavy.
- Sealing and boilingA floured pudding-cloth tied over the basin is the period method; a pleated round of baking parchment under foil, tied with string, does the same job and is less likely to leak. Keep the water at a rolling boil, topping up with boiling water from a kettle so the pudding is never off the boil.
- Time and donenessAn hour and a half is right for this size, but check the centre with a probe: pork sausagemeat should reach 71C/160F. If your basin is larger or the sausages are packed tight, give it two hours.
- Cayenne and sageTwo fresh sage leaves is a light hand by modern taste, and the sauce is strained, so the flavour is subtle. Cayenne turns up frequently in Victorian savoury seasoning — a scant pinch here, not a teaspoon.
- The gravy is not optionalOnly two or three tablespoons of stock go inside, so the pudding is fairly dry when cut. The brown gravy sent separately is what makes the dish work.
- "Probable cost"1s. per pound is simply the price Cassell's quotes for sausages. The "probable cost" line appears throughout the book as a household budgeting aid, and tells you nothing about quality beyond "good pork sausages".
Boiled suet puddings, sweet and savoury alike, were a mainstay of British cookery from the eighteenth century onwards, because they needed only a pot of water over an open fire rather than an oven the household might not have. The savoury versions — beefsteak and kidney, bacon, and this sausage pudding — are the cheaper relations of the raised pie, using suet and flour to stretch a pound of meat across four people. Cassell's cookery dictionaries, of which the New Dictionary of Cookery is one, were issued and reissued in fat illustrated editions over several decades, and were written for exactly the household that would care that sausages cost a shilling a pound. The onion-and-sage sauce is a nod to the classic English seasoning of pork, and the direction to strain it suits a general preference of the period for smooth sauces without visible vegetable.