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Chicken Pudding
4 cups Five Roses flour 2 teaspoons (large) baking powder 1 cup shortening Salt to taste.
Shortening may be lard or butter, or half and half.
Wet and flour pudding cloth. Set in a deep dish to keep its shape. Put plate on bottom. Roll paste to thickness of about half an inch. Line cloth with it and fill paste with chicken cut small. Sprinkle with flour, pepper and salt to taste. Add a piece of butter the size of an egg. Tie up tight in cloth. Drop into boiling water, and keep boiling for 2 hours. When done take pudding out of cloth and set on platter. Cut a round piece out of top, fill with water boiled in, loosen up chicken and serve. Fit for a king. -Mrs. H. Haryett, Fort Stewart, Ont.
A savoury boiled pudding in the British steak-and-kidney tradition, using a baking-powder crust rather than suet. The technique is unfamiliar now, but nothing about it is difficult once the cloth is handled properly.
- The hinge: keep it submergedThe pot must stay at a steady boil for the full two hours, with the pudding covered by water throughout. Top up with boiling water from a kettle, never cold, or the crust stops cooking and turns sodden.
- The plate in the pot"Put plate on bottom" most likely means an inverted plate or trivet on the floor of the pot, so the pudding does not sit on direct heat and scorch; the wording is terse enough that it could also mean a plate in the bottom of the dish. The deep dish mentioned earlier is a basin used to hold the floured cloth open while you line and fill it.
- Preparing the clothWet a clean cotton or linen cloth in boiling water, wring it out, and dust the inside generously with flour — the flour forms the skin that keeps water out. Tie the top with string, leaving room for the crust to swell, and make a loop to lift it by.
- Butter the size of an eggAbout 2 ounces, or 4 tablespoons. Season the filling generously: the recipe leaves pepper and salt "to taste", and nothing else seasons the meat.
- Cut the chicken small, and bonelessThigh meat in 1-inch pieces holds up better than breast over two hours. Boneless meat is also easier to spoon out through the cut-out top than bone-in pieces, which the original probably assumed.
- No liquid is addedThe filling is dry-packed and floured; the chicken releases its own gravy inside the sealed crust. The instruction to "fill with water boiled in" means ladling a little of the cooking water into the opened top to loosen the meat — a spoonful or two of chicken stock is better.
- Basin instead of clothA greased pudding basin large enough for the full quantity of paste and filling, lined with the paste, covered with pleated parchment and foil and tied, is much less fuss. Set it on a trivet in a covered pot with water halfway up the sides, and allow at least the original two hours, checking that the chicken is cooked through.
- Doneness and yieldChicken should reach 165F at the centre; check through the cut-out top. Four cups of flour makes a large pudding, enough for six to eight as a main course.
The Five Roses Cook Book was published by the Lake of the Woods Milling Company to promote its Five Roses flour, and it was built largely from recipes sent in by Canadian housewives — hence the attribution to Mrs. H. Haryett of Fort Stewart, Ontario. A boiled pudding of meat sealed in a paste and cooked in a cloth is an English inheritance, the same method behind steak and kidney pudding, and it survived in rural Canadian kitchens for practical reasons: it needs only a pot of water and a good fire, no oven, and it feeds a large table from a modest bird. The use of baking powder and shortening rather than the older beef suet is the recognisably North American touch, and the flour-dusted cloth — the trick that keeps the boiling water out of the crust — is generally traced back to the seventeenth century, when the pudding cloth freed cooks from having to stuff such things into an animal's stomach or intestine.