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Suet Paste (Grease and line) (II)
Grease and line a pint-and-a-half pudding basin with good suet paste, cut up the veal cutlet and place it in the bottom of the basin, cut up the partridges into neat joints, lay them on the cutlet, sprinkle over pepper, salt, chopped shalot, and mushrooms, pour in the stock, wet the edge of the paste, put on the top crust, tie over with a cloth, plunge into boiling water and boil steadily for two hours.
Poulet en Casserole, Take a nice tender fowl or a pheasant, trussed for boiling, rub it well all over with lemon.
Take an earthenware casserole large enough to hold the fowl easily; put into this three ounces of butter, three button onions peeled and stuck with two cloves, a full bouquet garni * of every herb to hand, but very little of each, and two ounces of bacon cut into dice. Allow all these ingredients to get hot, then put the fowl in, and cook it very gently on the stove for about one hour; baste it frequently, and turn it from time to time. If the butter gets absorbed you must add a little more.
When the fowl is cooked, pour off all the fat, season the fowl with pepper and salt, add a ladleful (one gill) of rich gravy, or a tablespoonful of liquefied meat glaze, put the casserole in the oven for ten minutes, baste the bird well with the gravy. Take up the fowl, dish it up on a hot dish, strain the gravy from the pan over the fowl, and serve. If served on a bed of rice, the rice must be cooked in good stock. Garnish with watercress. * A. full bouquet garni consists of thyme, lemon thyme, basil, bayleaf, chives or leeks, lemon peel, parsley root and leaf, celery, mace, marjoram, tarragon, and chervil, Asparagus. Pick off the loose leaves, scrape the stalks, and wash them in cold water; cut all the stalks the same length, and tie them together in small bundles, the heads all the same way. Put the asparagus into hot water with a little salt, and boil gently for about twenty minutes till tender, taking care not to break the heads. Serve the asparagus on a slice of thick toast dipped in the water the asparagus was boiled in. Hand melted butter with a few drops of lemon-juice in it.
Three separate dishes have run together on this page: a boiled game pudding in suet crust, a fowl cooked in an earthenware pot, and boiled asparagus. Treat them as three recipes and the instructions make sense.
- The basin and the waterA pint-and-a-half basin is imperial measure, about 30 fl oz or a little over 3 1/2 US cups. Grease it, line it with the paste leaving an overhang, and once the cloth is tied on keep the water at a steady boil for the full two hours, topping it up as it evaporates.
- A gillOne gill is a quarter of an imperial pint, 5 fl oz, or roughly 1/2 cup plus a tablespoon. The recipe's own gloss of "a ladleful" is the looser figure of the two.
- "Casserole" here is the potA casserole is the earthenware vessel itself, used on direct heat as well as in the oven, not a baked dish of food. A heavy enamelled cast-iron cocotte does the same job; flameware earthenware needs a diffuser on a modern gas or induction hob.
- Asparagus timingTwenty minutes was written for thick stalks of the kind the recipe has you scrape. Modern asparagus is usually tender in 3 to 6 minutes in salted water, or 8 for very thick spears. The tied bundles are still worth doing to keep the heads intact.
- Meat glazeLiquefied meat glaze is stock reduced to a syrup that sets solid when cold. A tablespoon of homemade demi-glace, or a good commercial veal glace, is the equivalent; a stock cube is not, being mostly salt.
- The oven stepThe ten minutes at the end is a glazing step rather than further cooking. The recipe gives no oven temperature; use a hot oven and baste the bird well so the gravy lacquers the skin.
- Doneness of the fowlAn hour of gentle stovetop cooking suits a smallish bird; anything larger needs longer. Check that the thickest part of the thigh reaches 165F before the gravy goes in.
- Partridge and the bouquetThe recipe does not say how many partridges; a pair gives well under a pound of meat off the bone, and a pair of quail or a jointed poussin substitutes in the pudding. The "full bouquet garni" list is a suggestion of range, not a shopping list — the instruction "very little of each" is the operative part, and four or five of those herbs is plenty.
- YieldThe recipe gives no yield; a pint-and-a-half pudding will serve three or four, and the fowl three to four with rice and watercress.
Boiled game puddings in suet crust were a fixture of the English game season, and the pairing of partridge with a layer of veal or beefsteak at the bottom of the basin was practical rather than decorative: lean game birds give little fat and less body, so a cut of butcher's meat underneath supplied both the juices and the body the gravy needed. Poulet en casserole belongs to a different tradition entirely — the late-Victorian and Edwardian English adoption of French bourgeois cooking, in which the earthenware pot came to the table and the bird was served in its own butter and glaze rather than under a made sauce. That both appear in the same book alongside plain boiled asparagus shows how professional English kitchens of the period worked: a French repertoire, English game and joints, and vegetables still cooked to long inherited timings.