Home › Meat Substitutes › Cheese Dumpling
Cheese Dumpling
6 ounces of cheese 1 onion Pepper and salt to taste Paste Partly cook the onion, strain, and chop finely; grate the cheese, add to the onion with the pepper. Have ready some paste, and put the mixture in the center. Enclose, and form into a ball, and dust with flour; tie it up in a cloth, and boil one and one-half to two hours.
A boiled pudding in miniature: a savoury filling sealed in crust, tied in a cloth, and simmered. The original assumes you already know what "paste" means and how to manage a pudding cloth, so those are the gaps worth filling.
- What "paste" meansThe recipe does not say. For something boiled in a cloth a suet crust is the likeliest intention — as a guide, about 8 oz flour to 4 oz shredded suet, half a teaspoon salt and cold water to a soft dough, which will comfortably wrap 6 oz of cheese; a plain short or flour-and-water paste would also answer to the name. If the dish is to stay meatless, vegetable suet or chilled shortening is needed, since butcher's suet is not.
- The cheeseA firm, dry cheese of the Cheddar, Cheshire or Lancashire type is the safest reading. A soft, young or high-moisture cheese is more likely to run and leak through the crust over two hours of boiling. Grate it coarsely rather than finely so it melts into strands rather than a puddle.
- "Partly cook the onion"Boil or steam the onion whole or halved for a few minutes, drain it well, then chop it finely as the recipe directs. This takes the raw bite off and, more importantly, removes water that would otherwise steam the crust from the inside.
- Sealing the ballRoll the paste to about a quarter inch, set the filling in the centre, and gather the edges over the top, pinching hard. Any gap lets water in and the cheese out; the flour dusting mentioned in the original helps the seams grip.
- The pudding clothScald a square of clean cotton or muslin, wring it out, and flour the inside surface generously — the flour forms a skin that keeps water from soaking the crust. Tie it with enough slack for the crust to swell.
- BoilingFull immersion in boiling water at a steady simmer, lid on, topped up with boiling water from a kettle as it drops. Never add cold water and never let it go off the boil, or the suet sets and the crust turns heavy. A trivet or upturned saucer keeps the cloth off the pan base.
- TimingThe recipe allows one and a half to two hours; the shorter end should serve for a single ball of this size. The crust should feel firm through the cloth and the surface look dry rather than pasty when unwrapped.
- Yield and servingServes two as a main course, three if cut into wedges alongside other dishes. It wants something sharp and wet against it — a brown onion gravy, tomato sauce, or plain mustard — since the pudding itself is rich and dense.
History: Boiled puddings tied in a floured cloth were one of the great labour-saving devices of the British kitchen: a whole dish cooked in the same pot as everything else, over a single fire, with no oven required. The pudding cloth is generally traced to the seventeenth century, and is credited with freeing puddings from the animal gut they had previously been boiled in; the technique survived into the twentieth century in much this form — a suet crust round a savoury centre, boiled for a couple of hours. Cheese was one of the staples that vegetarian and wartime cookery leaned on when a household gave up the joint. The recipe's brevity suggests a reader already familiar with boiled puddings, who needed only to be told what to put in the middle of this one.