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White Puddings
White puddings are frequently made with the white part (otherwise the frill or fraise) of a calf's pluck boiled and minced, and mixed with an equal weight of boiled bacon, soaked bread-crumbs, and sausage-meat, seasoned with salt and pepper, flavoured with boiled onion and spices, and bound together with yolk of egg. The puddings thus made will not keep. They should be put into well-cleaned sausage-skins, and baked in the oven or broiled over a clear fire, and served very hot. Before being used the calf's frill should be thrown into cold water, and kept there till wanted. It should be boiled in salt and water, and cooled before being minced for the pudding.
Cassell's gives a method rather than a formula: no quantities beyond "an equal weight", no oven temperature, no timing. What follows fills those gaps and translates the butchery.
- Calf's frill or fraiseThis is the calf's mesentery — the frilled fatty membrane from the intestines, sold in France as fraise de veau. It is not stocked by supermarkets and generally needs a halal or traditional butcher, or an order placed in advance. A mild, gelatinous cooked pork or veal cut can stand in for texture, but the dish then stops being a white pudding in the old sense.
- PluckA pluck is the heart, lungs and liver taken out together. Lungs cannot legally be sold for food in the United States, so a whole pluck is not obtainable there; heart and liver are.
- The proportions are not givenThe text says the minced frill is mixed with 'an equal weight of boiled bacon, soaked bread-crumbs, and sausage-meat', which may mean an equal weight of bacon alone or of the three together; the crumbs, sausage-meat, onion and spice are otherwise left to the cook. A workable reading is equal parts frill, bacon and sausage-meat by weight, with soaked crumbs at about a quarter of that total and one yolk per pound of mixture.
- Oven and internal temperatureCassell's says only "baked in the oven". Treat these as fresh sausages: 375-400F until the centre reads 160-165F, roughly 25-35 minutes for a standard-gauge link. A clear fire is one burnt down to bright, smokeless coals; keep the heat moderate, since too fierce a heat splits the skins before the middle is hot.
- "Will not keep" is the hingeA pudding of boiled offal, bacon and egg yolk with no salt cure and no drying is a same-day preparation. Fill the skins and cook them within a few hours, keeping everything refrigerated in the meantime, and eat the cooked puddings hot. Do not treat these like a hung or smoked sausage.
- SkinsNatural hog casings, salt-packed, are sold by butchers and online; rinse and soak them 30 minutes before filling. Fill loosely — the crumbs swell — and prick or needle each link before it goes near heat.
- Cold water and pre-boilingHolding the frill in cold water until wanted was standard practice for offal, drawing out blood and keeping it fresh and white; boiling it in salted water and cooling it firms it so that it minces cleanly instead of smearing.
- YieldAbout 2 lb of mixture fills roughly a dozen 4-inch links and serves six as a main course with mashed potato.
White puddings are the bloodless half of an old pair: black pudding sets its filling with blood, white pudding binds it with fat, cereal, egg or milk instead. The type runs across Europe — the French boudin blanc, the oatmeal-heavy mealy puddings of Scotland, the breadcrumb-and-suet white puddings of Ireland — though they answer to different economies, and the milk-and-white-meat richness of a boudin blanc is a long way from the kind of recipe in which killing an animal produced a mass of perishable soft offal that had to be used within a day or two. That the mixture here is built on the calf's mesentery, a part now almost invisible in English-speaking butchery, shows how much narrower the modern meat counter has become; Cassell's could assume its readers knew what a pluck and a frill were and could get both. The warning that the puddings "will not keep" is the honest admission of an uncured sausage.