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Whiting Pudding
Take half a pound of the flesh of cold boiled whiting perfectly freed from skin and bone. Pound it to a smooth paste, soften by working gradually into it four ounces of fresh butter which has been beaten to cream, and add three ounces of baked flour, a pinch of grated lemon-rind, a little pepper, salt, and grated nutmeg. Mix the ingredients thoroughly, and bind the mixture together with the yolks of four eggs and the well-whisked whites of three. Form the pudding to a bolster shape, roll it in oiled paper, and tie it in a cloth. Fasten both ends securely, and steam it over fast-boiling water. Turn it out carefully, serve on a hot dish, and send to table with it good white sauce nicely flavoured with lemon-juice in a tureen. Time to steam the pudding, one hour. Probable cost, 1s., without the sauce. Sufficient for four or five persons.
A Victorian fish quenelle scaled up to a steamed roll, built on leftover boiled whiting. It stands or falls on texture: the fish must be pounded truly smooth and the butter worked in cold-creamed, or the pudding steams into a grainy, weeping mass.
- The hinge: a smooth, cold emulsionPound the fish to a paste and beat the butter to cream separately, then work them together gradually, as the recipe says. A food processor does it in seconds, but keep everything cold and stop as soon as it is homogeneous; overworking warm butter breaks the mix and the pudding steams greasy.
- Baked flourFlour spread on a tray and dried in the oven, a preparation that turns up fairly often in Victorian cookery, both as a thickener and in invalid cookery, the drying said to remove the raw taste of flour. Three ounces is about two-thirds of a cup. The recipe gives no temperature; around 300F for 20-30 minutes, stirring, will do it, or substitute fine dry breadcrumbs by weight for a slightly lighter result.
- WhitingA small European member of the cod family, sweet and very lean, sold mostly in Britain. Haddock, pollock, hake or cod all work; avoid oily fish, which will overwhelm the lemon and nutmeg. Half a pound of cooked flesh means something like a pound and a quarter of whole fish, or three-quarters of a pound of fillet, before cooking.
- Weights and moneyHalf a pound fish, four ounces butter, three ounces flour, in metric 225g, 115g and 85g. The "probable cost, 1s." is a shilling in late-Victorian money and tells you this was reckoned an economical dish for using up yesterday's fish.
- The bolster and the clothOiled paper and a pudding cloth, as the recipe directs, is the usual dress for a cylindrical steamed pudding. Buttered parchment with a foil outer wrap, twisted and tied at both ends like a cracker, does the same job and is easier to seal. A buttered pudding basin of a pint and a half, covered and steamed, is the simplest substitute, though it gives a dome rather than a bolster.
- Steaming timeOne hour over fast-boiling water is right for a bolster of this size; the eggs need that long to set through a dense, buttery mixture. Keep the water topped up with boiling water so the steam never falters, and let the pudding rest five minutes before unwrapping or it may crack.
- The sauce"Good white sauce" here means a béchamel, ideally made with some of the fish cooking liquor, finished with lemon juice off the heat so it does not curdle. Make it while the pudding steams and keep it warm over hot water.
- YieldFour to five as the book says, but as a light main course rather than a modern portion. It also slices cold the next day and fries well in butter.
Steamed savoury puddings of pounded fish belong to the same Victorian family as quenelles and fish creams: a way of turning cold cooked fish, of which a household that bought whole fish had a great deal, into something that could be sent to table as a dish in its own right. Whiting was the cheap, abundant white fish of the British coast, recommended throughout nineteenth-century cookery books as light and digestible and often prescribed for invalids and children, which partly explains the gentle seasoning of lemon rind and nutmeg here. The kind of compendium such a recipe belongs to was aimed at the middle-class household with a cook and a strict eye on waste, and costings of this sort were common; a shilling for a dish feeding five was the sort of arithmetic its readers were expected to check.