Home › The Doctor's Kitchen › Pastry (Puddings are of more modern)

Pastry (Puddings are of more modern)

Puddings are of more modern invention, seeing that sugar and spices were rare and costly luxuries in the middle ages. Pepper was then the most common spice; and the old term of a "peppercorn rent" survives to show how highly this condiment was valued by the landlords of old times. It was frequently used for spicing over sweet pastry. Ginger, and cloves were the next common spices. Sugar was cheaper in those days than spices, but even this was costly, and difficult to obtain, so that it could not be employed after our present lavish way. In pastry-making the quality to be desired is lightness, which depends on the amount of air in the dough beforehand, and the expansion of the air after it is put in the oven. Therefore the best pastry is that which contains the greatest quantity of the coldest air before it is baked. The foldings, and rollings of pastry during its making have this increase of air in view; so that pastry should always be prepared in a cold place, and if set aside to wait between rollings, it should stand on a cold stone, or on ice. Eggs are used to increase the tenacity of the paste, and thus to make it hold more air. Baking powder has the same effect in pastry; it should be used rather for pastry to be baked at once, and little handled. The richer the paste, as a rule, the hotter should be the oven for baking it. All boiled puddings should be put on the fire in boiling water, and the pudding must always be kept covered with the water while simmering. The ingredients for puddings are generally better for being mixed some time before they are wanted. As an acceptable dish for dyspeptics, whilst good also for juveniles, an eggless plum pudding, of which a generous helping can be safely given, is to be made as usually; the materials being two small apples, and a medium-sized carrot, a pound each of stoned raisins, and currants, half a pound of mixed peel (minced), a grated nutmeg, half a teaspoonful of salt, an ounce of sweet almonds, chopped, or shredded cocoanut, twelve ounces of moist sugar, the same of chopped suet, twenty ounces of bread-crumbs, and a scant half-pint of home-made wine (raisin, or cowslip). No flour except what is used in chopping the suet, and as little as possible. This quantity composes three mediumsized, or four, small puddings, requiring four and a half hours' cooking. It is not advisable to form it into a single large pudding. For young children the currants may be replaced with advantage by sultanas, and the wine may be omitted in favour of milk with a good dessertspoonful of cornflour. In Alice through the Looking Glass the White Knight invented a new pudding during the meat course at dinner. " What did you mean to make it of?" Alice asked. "It began with blotting-paper," the Knight answered; "not very nice alone, but you've no idea what a difference it makes mixing it with other things, such as gunpowder, and sealing-wax." "In Hamelin Town" (R. Browning, 1842) "the inhabitants cling so devotedly to the Pied Piper Legend (Browning's poem) that they take every opportunity of commemorating it, one of the ways being by the manufacture of representative rat-like doughnuts, which is quite a local industry. The Hamelin Rats are made from a fermented dough of so light a character that they look almost like biscuits. It is composed of the very coarsest kind of flour, and becomes so hard that unless having teeth as sharp as the rat itself anyone attempting to eat the dough-nut would fail to make an impression thereupon. The tails, and paws are put on separately, but the ears are cut, and two currants form the eyes, whilst a few stout bristles passed through the dough make the rat's whiskers; the shapes are then baked of a dark-brown colour, and glazed; they find a ready sale as associated with the legend.

The Saturday Review has said in cynical mood that "pie-crust has killed more people than drink." For all persons who lack strong digestive powers, especially for the sick, pastry, of whatever sort, and however well made, is very questionable. Puddings, pies, and sweet confections of this character are baked, or boiled, at a high temperature, so that changes take place in the fats used, with formation of butyric, and other unwholesome acids; the flour, too, is altered in condition, and if a pudding or paste is boiled, the mass becomes solidified, and tenacious, so that the digestive juices cannot easily penetrate it. Goldsmith, who was always at his wit's end for money, and seldom sat at a well-furnished table tells in the Haunch of Venison respecting such feasts as he obtained access to in his day :- "At the top a fried liver, and bacon were seen, At the bottom was tripe in a swingeing tureen, At the sides there was spinach, and pudding made hot, At the middle a place where the Pastry-was not."

The Pasty, or Turn-over, in truth a Cornish device, originated in the need by the miners of a portable food which they might carry with them to the mines for their dinner, and might eat without suffering harm by handling it with coppery fingers. Hence arose the Miner's Pasty, which is commonly slipped by them into a small cotton bag with a string run into the top, so that the contents may be eaten from out the bag, to be held in the miner's hand, and turned back as the Pasty diminishes. A Rhubarb pie is improved by sprinkling lemon-juice over it when eaten. A beef-steak pudding is to be preferred before a beef-steak pie (which often engenders harmful gaseous products within it). A mutton-chop pudding, with oysters therein, is excellent.

The Pie, both in its name, and in its nature, is peculiarly national to England, and interwoven with the history of our country's culture. "No soil upon earth is so dear to our eyes As the mud we first stirred in terrestrial pies; And what are the prizes we perish to win To the first little minnow we caught with a pin?"

Pepys tells of going (January 6th, 1661) to dinner to Sir Wm. Penn's (his wedding day), "where we had, besides a good chine of beef, and other good cheer, eighteen Mince-pies in a dish, — the number of years that he hath been married." "Mincing of meat in pies," quoth Bacon, "saveth the grinding of the teeth." The Christmas pie of the Restoration Period (seventeenth century) was a noble dish rarely weighing less than fourteen pounds, and often exceeding several stones in weight. The meat ingredients then represented nine-tenths of this minced, or shred pie, with only a flavouring of dried fruits, plums, raisins, and citron peel, which were then expensive luxuries; but nowadays the meat ingredients have shrunk, and shrunk, until only a mere trifle of chopped suet remains as a reminder of the solid fare of a robuster age. The Pie is an English institution which when once planted on American soil, forthwith ran rampant, and burst forth into an untold variety of genera, and species. In the City of New York there exists a monster pie-baking company, one of the oldest trusts in the city; tens of thousands of pies (as consumed there daily) are produced at this particular bakery. Each season has its favourite pie, but all the year round Apple pie is well to the fore. Hot pie is the proper thing, according to the judgment of the دو pie-men; there is as much difference between a piping-hot luscious Apple pie, fresh from the oven, and a cold edition of the same pie, as there is between wine, and vinegar. After Apple pie, the next favourite, especially at Christmas, is "Mince." Peach, Pine-apple, Lemon Custard, and Cocoanut pies are in demand all the year round. This great Baking Company uses a hundred and ten thousand eggs daily. Huckleberry, Cherry, Cranberry, Pumpkin, Strawberry, Plum, Gooseberry, Currant, and Blackberry pie are in great demand, each in its particular season. "Meringue is a cold-weather sort of pie, and only a moderate favourite then. The notion that pies properly baked are indigestible is treated by the manager as a delusion exploded long ago by medical authority. The late P. T. Barnum used to eat his three slices a day, and he lived to be eighty-two years of age, being a model of good nature, and shrewd amiability. "My observation is," says the Manager, "that persons who confine themselves to animal food are gross in structure, and intellect. There is no animalism in pie; and your reasonable pie-eater is a man of fine texture physically, and among the stars mentally." Our English fruit pies are not correctly called "tarts"; in the true tart the fruit (or jam) is put within a ring of baked dough, as evolved from the Roman twisted ring called "torte." As long ago as in 1863, The Lancet admonished the public concerning Meat pies, in words of warning which are just as necessary now as then for careful heed : "All learned chemists, and toxicologists have to be reminded of the important fact that if a Meat pie is made without a hole in the top crust to let out certain noxious emanations from the meat during cooking, then colic, vomiting, diarrhea, and other symptoms of poisoning, in more, or less degree, are likely to occur, particularly in pies made of beef, and rabbit. Herring pie was a favourite dish with our ancestors; and from Great Yarmouth a hundred herrings are still sent once a year by the Burgesses to the Sheriff of Norwich to be made into twenty-four pies for the King.