Important: Safety Warning
This page describes collecting wild birds' eggs, shooting birds for specimens, or similar practices. These activities are now illegal under wildlife-protection laws, including the Migratory Bird Treaty Act, and they contributed to the decline of the very species described.
This information has been left in for historical purposes but should not be acted upon.
Home › Sauces › Suet Paste (Grease and line)
Suet Paste (Grease and line)
Grease and line a pint-and-a-half pudding basin with good suet paste. Bone and clean the larks, stuff each one with liver farce with an oyster in the middle, wrap each lark up in a thin strip of steak, season each piece of steak with pepper and salt and a very little grated nutmeg. Put some pieces of steak in the bottom of the basin, put the rolled-up larks in neatly, sprinkle over the chopped shalot and mushrooms, pour in the brown sauce, fill in with any pieces of steak left, wet round the edge of the paste, put on the top crust, tie it up in a cloth tightly, plunge into boiling water and boil gently for two hours.
This is a boiled lark pudding, and its central ingredient puts it out of reach. The notes below explain the terms and why the dish cannot be reproduced today.
- The larksSkylarks and related songbirds were sold by the dozen in Victorian and Edwardian game markets and are the whole point of this pudding. They are protected in Britain and across the EU; taking, killing, selling or possessing them here is an offence, and there is no lawful commercial source in this country. (Limited traditional lark-catching survives under derogation in parts of southern Europe.)
- No substitution offeredSmall boned birds are not interchangeable in a two-hour boiled pudding without rebalancing fat, liquid and timing, and we are not going to supply that here. If you want a steak-and-suet pudding, work from a current recipe written for one.
- Suet pasteA short crust of flour and shredded beef suet, typically two parts flour to one of suet with cold water and a little salt, raised with baking powder in later versions. Packet vegetable suet behaves similarly. "Grease and line" means buttering the basin, then pressing in the rolled paste and reserving a disc for the lid.
- The basinA pint-and-a-half basin is about 850 ml, a small pudding serving three or four. British pudding basins are still sold in this size.
- Liver farceFarce is forcemeat: here, chicken or calf's liver pounded with fat, breadcrumbs and seasoning. "Farce" and "farci" are still in use in professional kitchens, and "forcemeat" is generally taken to derive from the same word.
- ShalotAn older spelling of shallot. "Chopped shalot and mushrooms" gives no quantity, leaving the amount to the cook's judgement.
- Brown sauceNot the bottled condiment. In a book of this class it means espagnole or a reduced brown stock sauce made in-house, thickened with a brown roux.
- The cloth and the boilTying a floured cloth over the basin and lowering it into already-boiling water keeps the crust from waterlogging; the water must stay at a bare simmer or the paste bursts. The technique is sound and still used for steak and kidney pudding.
Lark pudding and lark pie belong to a long English tradition of eating small birds, which were netted in huge numbers on the Sussex downs and shipped to London markets through the nineteenth century; Dunstable in Bedfordshire was particularly associated with the trade, and larks appear on hotel and club menus well into the Edwardian years. The construction here, boned birds each wrapped in a strip of beef and packed into a suet-lined basin, is the same architecture as steak and kidney pudding, with the oyster inside each bird often said to be a survival from the days when oysters were cheap padding rather than luxury. The trade in them collapsed under a combination of falling bird numbers and successive protection acts, and this recipe now reads mainly as evidence of how completely the market changed.