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Pepper and Salt (Chop the suet finely mix all)
Chop the suet finely, mix all these ingredients well together, roll them up into small balls.
Poach them in boiling water for a few minutes and they are ready to serve.
What survives here is the method for small poached suet forcemeat balls; the ingredient list that stood above it has been lost, and the title is simply the tail end of it. The instructions are still usable if you supply a standard forcemeat.
- The missing ingredientsA book of this type would have listed breadcrumbs, chopped suet, a little chopped parsley and herbs, grated lemon rind, an egg to bind, and pepper and salt. The proportions cannot be recovered from this page; a conventional working ratio is roughly twice the volume of crumbs to suet, bound with one egg per cupful.
- SuetBeef suet is the hard fat from around the kidneys. Butchers will still supply it, and packaged shredded suet is sold in the UK. If you buy it in the lump, chill it hard before chopping or it smears rather than cuts; grating from frozen is easier than the chopping the recipe asks for.
- "Chop finely" mattersCoarse suet melts out in the poaching water and leaves the balls loose and greasy. Fine shreds distribute through the crumb and set the ball as they render.
- Poaching, not boilingDespite "boiling water," bring the pan back to a bare tremble once the balls go in. A rolling boil breaks them apart, particularly if the mixture is lightly bound.
- Size and timingThe recipe gives no measurement; 'small balls' is usually taken as about walnut-sized, an inch or so across. At that size 'a few minutes' would be roughly five to seven minutes. Larger balls need proportionally longer and are better simmered in stock.
- Cook one firstPoach a single ball as a tester before shaping the rest. It tells you whether the mixture holds together and whether the seasoning is right, which is the only real check available when the quantities are guesswork.
- Use and yieldThe page does not say how they were served, but balls of this kind were generally used as a garnish rather than eaten alone. At about an inch across, a cupful of mixture gives roughly a dozen balls, enough to finish a soup, a stew or a boiled fowl for four to six.
Forcemeat balls of this kind were standard equipment in a Victorian and Edwardian kitchen, which may be why the instruction is so brief: the handling was all that needed recording. Suet, breadcrumbs, herbs and an egg made a cheap, filling garnish that could be poached in whatever liquid was already on the stove and dropped into soups, fricassees, jugged hare or a boiled fowl to stretch the dish. The truncated title looks like the tail of a running ingredient list ending 'pepper and salt' being taken for the name of the dish.