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Venison Pudding
Take two pounds of venison from the neck or loin; cut the meat, fat and lean together, into neat pieces, and season these with salt and pepper. Put them in a saucepan, cover with water, and simmer gently for three-quarters of an hour. Lift them out, and let them get cold. Line a pudding-basin with pastry half an inch thick, lay in the venison, pour over it a quarter of a pint of the gravy, to which a wine-glassful of port has been added, and cover in the usual way. Press the edges securely together that the gravy may not escape. Wring a pudding-cloth out of boiling water, flour it well, and tie the pudding loosely in it. Plunge it into boiling water, and keep it boiling quickly until done enough. Let it stand a few minutes before turning it out. Send the remainder of the gravy to table in a tureen. Time to boil the pudding, about an hour and a half. Probable cost of venison, very uncertain.
A boiled suet-crust pudding of the old English kind, made with the same technique as steak and kidney. The recipe assumes you know what "cover in the usual way" and "a pudding-cloth" mean, so most of the work here is filling in those gaps.
- The pastry is suet crustThe pastry is almost certainly suet crust -- Cassell's "pastry" for a boiled pudding is generally suet crust rather than shortcrust: roughly 12 oz self-raising flour (or plain flour with 3 tsp baking powder) to 6 oz shredded suet, a good pinch of salt, and cold water to a soft dough. Shortcrust is far less likely to hold up in the boiling water.
- Half an inch is too thickLine the basin with the crust about a quarter-inch thick, reserving a third of the dough for the lid. A half-inch wall of suet crust does not cook through evenly in the middle and turns pasty against the filling.
- MeasuresA quarter of a pint is 5 imperial fl oz, about two-thirds of a US cup. A wine-glassful in this period is reckoned at roughly 2 fl oz, a quarter cup.
- Which cutNeck and loin behave very differently. Loin is lean and tender and will be dry after both a simmer and a 90-minute boil; neck, shoulder or haunch trim is the better choice. Venison carries almost no fat, so add 4 oz of diced beef fat or fatty bacon in place of the "fat and lean together" the original assumes.
- Cook the meat properly firstThree-quarters of an hour of gentle simmering is enough only for tender loin. Neck or shoulder wants an hour and a half to two hours, until it yields to a fork, and the pudding boil is not long enough to finish it. Cooling the meat before it goes into the crust matters: warm filling melts the suet out of the pastry.
- Cloth or foilThe floured cloth works, but a modern basin is more easily covered with a round of buttered baking parchment and foil, pleated across the middle to let the crust rise, and tied under the rim with string. Leave a string handle for lifting.
- Steam rather than boilPlunging a covered basin into fast-boiling water is the Victorian method and is fine if the basin is fully sealed, but steaming on a trivet in a covered pan of simmering water gives the same result with no risk of water breaching the lid. Either way, top up with boiling water so the pan never runs dry. Allow the full hour and a half.
- The gravyReduce the reserved cooking liquor by half before adding the port, or it will taste thin and watery next to the crust. Serve it hot in a jug alongside; only part of the gravy goes inside the pudding.
- YieldTwo pounds of meat plus the crust wants a basin of about 2 u00bd to 3 pints, and serves four to six.
Boiled suet puddings were the workhorse of the English kitchen from the eighteenth century onward: a cloth, a pot of water and a hearth were all they required. By the time Cassell's New Dictionary of Cookery appeared in the late nineteenth century the meat pudding had settled into a small family of variations on the same construction, steak and kidney being the famous one, and venison, pigeon, rabbit and mutton the rest. The note that the cost of venison is "very uncertain" is the honest part of the entry: it points to a supply whose price was volatile rather than settled. The port and the reserved gravy in a tureen are the marks of a dish being dressed up for a dining room, not a plain kitchen supper.