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Roman Meat Pudding
Mince 1 pint of cold veal, chicken, mutton or beef; take 1 cupful of good stock, nicely flavored, 1 egg, some lemon or tomato sauce, a little vermicelli or bread crumbs, pepper and salt; mix all together and season with a suspicion of onion and parsley. Line a meat mold or basin with some macaroni, previously boiled quite tender, fill the basin with the minced meat, steam for half an hour. Turn out of the basin and serve with a white sauce.
A Victorian way of turning yesterday's roast into a moulded pudding, held together with cooked macaroni. The instructions assume a steamer and a cook who knows what a basin is.
- A pint of minced meatMeat here is measured by volume, not weight: 1 pint of packed mince is roughly 1 lb (450 g) of cooked meat off the bone. Any cold roast works, and a mixture is fine.
- Grind, don't puree"Mince" means a coarse grind or a hand-chop. A food processor will turn cooked meat to paste in seconds, which gives a pasty rather than a crumbly pudding; pulse briefly or chop by hand.
- Lining the basinThe macaroni is the crust. Boil long macaroni until fully tender, then coil it around the inside of a buttered 1-quart pudding basin in overlapping rings so the mould holds its shape when turned out. Modern elbow macaroni will not coil; long macaroni or bucatini will.
- Vermicelli or crumbsThese are the binder along with the egg. Reckon about 1/2 cup of fresh breadcrumbs, or a small handful of vermicelli broken fine and cooked, and add only enough that the mixture holds together loosely.
- "A suspicion of onion"A teaspoon or two of very finely minced onion, no more. In this style of cookery raw onion in a steamed pudding is meant to register as background, and it does not get long enough heat to lose its bite if used generously.
- Steaming setupCover the basin with buttered parchment or foil and set it on a rack in a pan of simmering water reaching halfway up the sides. Half an hour is enough to set the egg through a small basin; a deeper mould wants 45 minutes, and the centre should reach 165F.
- Turning outLet it stand five minutes off the heat before inverting, and run a thin knife around the edge first. Turned out hot and immediately, the macaroni lining tends to slump.
- Sauce and yieldServes three to four. Finish with a plain white sauce; the lemon or tomato sauce named in the ingredients is the only other sauce the recipe mentions. Spoon it around rather than over, so the moulded top shows.
Steamed meat puddings in a lined basin were one of the nineteenth century's answers to cold roast, in an era when a joint was bought large and eaten down over several days and little was thrown out. The "Roman" in the title appears to do the same work as "Italian" or "Milanese" on English and American menus of the period: it signals macaroni, which was becoming cheaper and more widely available in the United States towards the end of the century and was still novel enough to name a dish after. The stock, the egg and the crumbs are doing what they always do in this family of recipes, stretching a pint of meat into a dish for four.