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Bread and Onion Pudding
1/4 pound bread crumbs 1 teaspoon sage 1/2 pound onions 1/2 pint milk 1 ounce butter Pepper and salt Put the bread crumbs in a bowl. Boil the milk, and pour it over them; cover with a plate, and let them stand for an hour. Slice the onions--they must be weighed after peeling. Throw them into cold water, and let them come to a boil as quickly as possible, letting them boil fast for three minutes, then drain the water from them. Chop them roughly, and add them to the milk and crumbs. Rub the sage between the fingers, and put it through a sieve, so that there will be no bits of stalk in it, add it with a seasoning of pepper to the other ingredients, melt the butter, and mix carefully into the pudding. It may be either baked for an hour in a moderate oven and served in the dish it was baked in, or steamed for two hours in a well buttered mold, and turned out.
This is sage-and-onion stuffing given standing on its own as a dish, and it succeeds or fails on the onions: parboiled hard for three minutes and drained, they lose their raw bite without turning to sweet mush.
- Weights to volume1/4 pound of dry breadcrumbs is roughly 1 cup; if using soft fresh crumbs, about 2 cups. 1/2 pound of onions, weighed peeled, is one to two medium onions.
- The half pint of milkIf the book is American, this is 8 fl oz; if British, an imperial half pint is 10 fl oz. Start with a cup and add more only if the crumbs stay dry — the mixture should be moist and holding together, not soupy.
- Moderate oven350F. An hour at that heat gives a set pudding with a browned top; cover loosely if the surface colours before the centre firms.
- Dried sageA full teaspoon of dried sage is assertive, and modern ground sage is finer and stronger than the rubbed leaf the author was sieving stalks out of. Use a scant teaspoon of rubbed sage, or half a teaspoon if it is the powdered kind.
- SaltSalt appears in the ingredient list but the method only mentions pepper. Season the milk-and-crumb mixture to taste before it goes into the dish — about half a teaspoon.
- Baked or steamedThe baked version is drier and firmer with a crust; the steamed version, two hours in a buttered mould set in a covered pan of simmering water, is soft and sliceable. Keep the water topped up and the mould covered with foil or a cloth so condensation does not water it down.
- ButterOne ounce is 2 tablespoons. Butter the dish or mould generously as well, particularly for the steamed version, which will not turn out cleanly otherwise.
- YieldServes three or four as a substantial side, or two as the centre of a plate with gravy and a green vegetable.
Bread, onion, sage and a little fat is the classic British stuffing mixture, and cooking it as a pudding in its own dish rather than inside a bird is an old thrift. The instruction to weigh the onions after peeling, and to boil them fast for exactly three minutes before draining, may reflect a period habit of treating onions as something needing to be tamed: the brief hard boil arguably carries off the sulphurous harshness and the discarded water with it.