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Teal Pudding
Take three teal and a pound of tender rump steak. Divide the birds into neat joints, and season them well with salt and cayenne. Cut up the steak into pieces an inch square, season them, and dredge them lightly with flour. Line a shallow, thick-rimmed pudding-basin with good suet pastry rolled out to the thickness of half an inch, and leave an inch of crust to overlap the edge. Place in the basin a layer of steak and a layer of jointed teal, and repeat until the dish is full. Pour in a quarter of a pint of beef gravy. Moisten the edges of the pastry, lay the cover on the top, press the crusts closely together, and turn over the overlapping pastry that the gravy may not escape. Tie the pudding in a floured cloth, plunge it into boiling water, and keep it boiling quickly until done enough. Take it up, let it stand a few minutes, and either turn it out upon a hot dish, or serve in the basin in which it was boiled, with a napkin pinned round it. Time to boil, two hours. Sufficient for six or seven persons.
A boiled suet pudding of game and beef, of the kind that dominated British winter cookery before the oven-baked pie took over. The method is sound; the shopping list is the hard part.
- The hinge: keep the water boilingThe pudding cooks by conducted heat through the basin, so the pot must stay at a genuine rolling boil for the full two hours. Top up with boiling water from a kettle, never cold, and keep the level at least two-thirds up the basin.
- TealTeal is the smallest European wild duck, roughly 12 oz whole, so three birds yield perhaps a pound of jointed meat. It is legal quarry in season in Britain and North America but is not sold in supermarkets; a game dealer is the route. Two or three whole wood pigeons, or a small mallard, stand in on scale and flavour.
- ShotWild-shot birds carry pellets. Feel through each joint before layering, and warn the table, since a pudding hides what a roast displays.
- Suet pastryStandard proportions are 8 oz self-raising flour to 4 oz shredded suet, a good pinch of salt, and cold water to a soft but not sticky dough. At the specified half-inch thickness that will line and cover a basin of roughly two pints, though the recipe names no size and the quantity of filling may call for a larger basin and more dough.
- A quarter of a pintFive imperial fluid ounces, about 145 ml, or a scant two-thirds of a US cup. It is deliberately little: the meat gives up plenty of its own liquor and an over-filled pudding bursts its seams.
- The clothA floured cloth tied over the basin is still the traditional seal, but a pleated round of baking parchment under pleated foil, tied under the rim with string and given a loop handle, is easier to lift out of boiling water.
- CayenneVictorian cayenne was frequently adulterated, and its strength was accordingly unpredictable. Season with restraint if you want the teal to read as teal.
- Time and yieldTwo hours suits a basin of roughly two pints at a hard boil; a larger pudding will want longer. The stated six or seven servings probably assumes it is one dish among several. Four is a fairer modern estimate.
Boiled meat puddings were the everyday counterpart of the pie in households without a reliable oven: a basin, a cloth and a pot over the fire would do, and the suet crust both sealed the meat and stretched it. Beef steak was the standard filler, with game, kidney, oysters or larks added according to season and purse — Cassell's New Dictionary of Cookery, compiled in the last decades of the nineteenth century, prints a long run of such variations. Teal, the smallest of the wild ducks, arrived on inland tables in autumn and winter with the wildfowling season, and pairing it with rump steak solved two problems at once: the beef supplied fat and bulk that a lean little duck cannot, while the birds gave the gravy a depth that beef alone would not. The instruction to serve in the basin with a napkin pinned round it belongs to the same period's dining-room conventions, when a pudding too fragile to turn out was still expected to reach the table looking deliberate.