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Spinach Pudding
Take six good table-spoonfuls of spinach when boiled, pressed, and chopped (or, it may be, spinach dressed the previous day); add the same quantity of bread-crumbs soaked in milk and drained, a little salt, grated nutmeg, or mace, and four eggs beaten up; mix all well together; butter a pudding-mould, and boil one hour and a half. Spinach pudding is eaten with melted butter or shrimp sauce.
A savoury boiled pudding of the old English type: spinach, panade and egg set in a mould over water rather than in an oven. The hinge is the mould — it must be sealed and the water must never come off a gentle simmer, or the egg curdles and the pudding weeps.
- How much spinachSix tablespoons of spinach that has been boiled, pressed and chopped represents a good deal of raw leaf — reckon on roughly a pound of fresh spinach, or most of a 10 oz block of frozen leaf spinach, thawed; treat the equivalence as approximate. Squeeze it hard in a cloth; residual water is the main cause of a loose pudding.
- Bread-crumbs soaked in milkUse torn crumb from a plain white loaf, not dried packaged crumbs, which absorb differently. Soak in just enough warm milk to saturate, then press out the excess so the volume roughly matches the spinach.
- Four eggs is rightIt reads generous against a cup or so of solids, but this is the setting agent for a pudding cooked in water with no flour. Do not reduce them.
- Buttering and sealing the mouldButter a 1 to 1 1/2 pint pudding basin or mould well, fill it no more than three-quarters, and cover with buttered parchment and then foil, tied or crimped tightly. Uncovered, condensation runs in and the top goes to soup.
- "Boil" means steam"Boil" in practice -- Stand the mould on a trivet or folded cloth in a deep pan, pour in boiling water to come at least halfway up the sides, and hold it at a bare simmer, topping up with boiling water as needed. A hard rolling boil will make the egg mixture grainy.
- TimingNinety minutes suits a full-sized mould; small individual moulds are done in 30 to 40 minutes. It is set when a skewer comes out clean and the pudding shrinks slightly from the sides. Rest five minutes before turning out.
- Mace or nutmegThe recipe offers either. Blade mace should be ground finely or the pudding is gritty, and a scant 1/4 teaspoon is enough.
- The sauces"Melted butter" in a book of this period is not clarified butter but a flour-thickened butter sauce — a white roux let down with water or milk, closer to a thin béchamel. Shrimp sauce is the same base with picked brown shrimp and a little of their liquor stirred in at the end.
- YieldFour modest servings as a side or light supper dish.
Boiled and steamed savoury puddings sat somewhere between a vegetable dish and a pudding course in nineteenth-century English cookery. The instruction that it may be made with "spinach dressed the previous day" is the point of the recipe as much as the flavour: it was written for households where a leftover dish of greens was expected to reappear, upgraded rather than repeated. The pairing with shrimp sauce looks odd now but was conventional then, when a flour-and-butter sauce with picked shrimps was served across boiled fish, vegetables and made dishes alike.