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Chicken-and-Rice Pudding
Cut the meat from the remains of a cold fowl, and take half its weight in ham. Free it from skin and gristle, and pound it in a mortar, with a little salt, white pepper, and pounded mace. To 1 pound of fowl, and half a pound of ham, allow a cupful of rice. Boil this in some nicely flavored stock till it is sufficiently cooked, then drain it, and add to it a cupful of new milk and the pounded meat. Stir these well together.
Put the mixture into a buttered mould, dredge a little flour over the top, tie it in a floured cloth, and boil it for an hour, taking care that the water in the saucepan does not reach as high as the top of the mould. Serve with mushroom or oyster sauce. Sufficient for six persons.
A Victorian way of turning leftover roast fowl into a second dinner: a savoury steamed pudding, closer to a quenelle mixture than to anything sweet. The one thing to get right is the mould — it must sit in gently simmering water that never rises near the rim, or water works under the cloth and the pudding turns sodden.
- Pounding the meatA mortar was the usual tool for this; a food processor does it in twenty seconds. Pulse rather than run it continuously — you want a coarse paste with some texture, not a smooth emulsion.
- "Cold fowl" and hamAny cooked chicken or turkey works: about 1 lb of picked meat to 8 oz of ham. Modern supermarket ham is far saltier than a home-boiled joint, so hold back the added salt until you have tasted the mixture.
- Pounded maceGround mace, the lacy outer coat of nutmeg. A quarter teaspoon is plenty for this quantity. Nutmeg is a reasonable substitute at about half the amount, though it is sweeter and less floral.
- A cupful of riceRoughly 7 oz of long-grain rice, uncooked. The recipe boils it in stock and then drains it, so cook it in plenty of liquid rather than by absorption, and drain off what remains.
- New milkSimply fresh whole milk, as opposed to milk that had stood and been skimmed. Whole milk is the direct equivalent.
- The mould and clothA 1½-quart pudding basin, well buttered. If you have no floured cloth, a doubled sheet of buttered baking parchment with a pleat folded across it, tied under the rim with string, does the same job. Water should come no more than two-thirds up the sides.
- Timing and donenessAn hour at a bare simmer is right for this size. Since the meat is already cooked, you are steaming the rice-and-milk binding to set; a skewer to the centre should come out hot to the touch of your wrist.
- The sauceMushroom or oyster sauce here means a sauce enriched with either — oyster sauce of this period being a white sauce, mushroom sauce made both white and brown — not the bottled Chinese condiment of the same name. A béchamel with sautéed mushrooms folded through is the easier of the two.
- YieldSix as written, as a main course with a green vegetable. It slices best after five minutes' rest in the mould.