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Veal and Macaroni Pudding
Take as much veal (free from bone) as will about three-parts fill the pudding-basin it is intended to use. Half a pound of bacon, the veal kidney or part of it, the sweetbread, or a few oysters or mushrooms, may be added to the veal. Cut the meat into small neat pieces, and season with pepper and salt. Break into one-inch lengths as much macaroni as will fill the vacant space in the pudding-basin, and soak these in lukewarm water for half an hour. Line the pudding-basin with good suet pastry. Fill it with layers of meat and macaroni, and sprinkle grated lemon and powdered mace between the layers. Add half a tea-cupful of stock or water for gravy and a dessert-spoonful of lemon-juice. Lay a pastry cover on the top of the pudding tie the pudding in a floured cloth, plunge it into boiling water and keep it boiling quickly until done enough. Take it up, untie the cloth, and run a sharp skewer into the pudding, in order to ascertain whether or not the meat is tender. If not, it will require longer boiling. If it is done enough, turn it out carefully upon a hot dish, and serve immediately. Time to boil a pudding made with a pound and a half of veal, about two hours. Probable cost, varying with the nature of the contents. Sufficient for seven or eight persons.
A Victorian boiled suet pudding, closer in construction to a steak and kidney pudding than to anything baked. Most of what needs translating is the vessel, the liquid, and the behaviour of dried pasta over a two-hour boil.
- The pudding-basinA standard basin here is 1.5 to 2 pints (about 900 ml to 1.1 litres), which is what a pound and a half of veal plus macaroni will fill. Grease it well; suet crust sticks.
- Suet pastry proportionsThe recipe specifies only "good suet pastry". A standard suet crust is roughly 8 oz self-raising flour to 4 oz shredded suet, a pinch of salt, and cold water to a soft dough. Roll it about a quarter-inch thick, reserving a third for the lid.
- The macaroni is the hingeNineteenth-century macaroni was a thick, hard-dried tube that could soak and then boil for two hours without collapsing. Modern quick-cooking macaroni will disintegrate into paste. Use large dried tubes such as rigatoni or ziti, and skip the soak entirely -- they need the two hours to hydrate in the pudding.
- Add more liquidA teacupful is usually reckoned at about a quarter of a pint, so half a teacupful is perhaps 2 to 3 fl oz (60-90 ml), and that was calculated for a pudding whose pasta had already soaked. Dried pasta going in unsoaked will drink far more; allow 8 to 10 fl oz of stock or the filling comes out dry and the tubes chalky.
- Steam rather than boil hard"Boiling quickly" was standard when the pudding was tied in a floured cloth, which shed water. If you cover the basin with pleated baking parchment and foil instead, stand it on a trivet in a pan of simmering water reaching two-thirds up the sides, and top up with boiling water as it drops.
- Grated lemonZest only -- avoid the white pith. A teaspoon of zest and a scant quarter-teaspoon of ground mace between the layers is enough for this quantity; mace is assertive.
- Sweetbread, kidney, oystersVeal sweetbread and veal kidney need a butcher's order and, in the case of sweetbread, soaking and blanching first. The recipe treats all the additions as optional; 8 oz of bacon and a handful of chestnut mushrooms make a perfectly faithful version.
- Testing and timingTwo hours for a pudding built on 1.5 lb of veal shoulder or shin is realistic; leg cut small will be drier. The skewer test is for the meat, not the crust -- it should meet no resistance.
- Turning outRest five minutes before inverting, or the crust can tear. Serves seven or eight as written, which is a generous Victorian portion count; six is more like a modern main course.
Boiled and steamed suet puddings with a savoury filling were a mainstay of British cooking through the nineteenth century, a way of making a modest quantity of meat feed a table by wrapping it in a substantial crust and cooking it over the same fire as everything else. Macaroni had long been a familiar grocery item in Britain, appearing in cookery books from the eighteenth century onwards and in mid-Victorian writers such as Acton and Beeton, and cookery writers were busy finding domestic uses for it beyond the sweet macaroni puddings and cheese-baked dishes it first arrived in. Here it functions as a stretcher and a sponge for gravy. The optional additions -- kidney, sweetbread, oysters -- suggest that offal and shellfish were often treated as cheap adjuncts to a joint rather than delicacies, though oyster prices in particular rose sharply late in the century.