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Savory Pudding
1/4 pound bread raspings 4 ounces grated cheese 4 ounces mashed potatoes 4 ounces onion 1 heaping tablespoon chopped parsley 1/4 pint milk 1 saltspoon each of pepper and salt Pour the milk over the bread raspings, mix well, and put them aside for four hours or more. They must be closely covered. Now peel, and slice the onion, and put it into a saucepan with cold water; let it boil up quickly, and continue to boil for a minute. Drain it, and chop it finely, and add it, with the other ingredients, to the soaked bread raspings. Butter a mold rather thickly, and fill with the mixture. Steam for three hours.
A steamed breadcrumb-and-cheese pudding of the wartime economy school. Nothing here is difficult, but two things need translating: what bread raspings are, and how long a pudding this size actually needs in the steamer.
- Bread raspingsRaspings are dried bread — usually crusts — baked hard and grated or rolled to a coarse crumb. Fine dry breadcrumbs are the direct substitute; 1/4 pound is roughly 1 to 1 1/2 cups depending on how coarsely they are ground. Fresh soft crumbs will collapse into paste and give a much wetter pudding.
- The soakThe four-hour covered soak is the hinge. Dry raspings absorb slowly, and a short soak leaves gritty pockets that never soften in the steam. Refrigerate if the kitchen is warm rather than leaving milk-soaked crumbs out.
- A quarter pint of milkAmbiguous: an imperial quarter-pint is 5 fl oz, an American one 4 fl oz. Start with 1/2 cup and add a spoonful more if the crumbs are still dusty after an hour of soaking — the mixture should be moist and holding together, not sloppy.
- SaltspoonA saltspoon is about 1/4 teaspoon. Two of them is modest seasoning for a pound of bland material; taste the raw mixture and adjust, remembering the cheese brings salt of its own.
- Boiling the onionThe minute in boiling water takes the raw bite off and softens the slices enough to chop fine. Four ounces is roughly one medium onion. Drain it well — carried-over water will loosen the mixture.
- The cheeseA dry hard cheese is what is wanted: aged Cheddar, or a similar grating cheese. Fresh mozzarella or anything high in moisture will weep into the crumb.
- Steaming timeThe recipe asks for three hours. The quantities fill only a small mold, so a modern cook may find it set well before that: cover the buttered mold with buttered parchment or foil, set it on a rack above simmering water, and start checking at around 1 1/2 hours — it is done when firm to the touch and pulling slightly from the sides. Keep the water topped up with boiling water.
- Yield and servingServes four as a main with gravy or a tomato sauce, six as a side. It turns out best after five minutes' rest in the mold, and slices more cleanly the next day; leftovers fry well.
Savory puddings belong to the older British tradition in which a pudding was simply anything bound and cooked in a cloth or mold, sweet or not, and steaming over the pot was the cheapest way to cook when oven fuel cost money. This one is built entirely from remnants — dried crusts, leftover mashed potato, a heel of cheese, one onion. Books of this kind multiplied in the early twentieth century, driven partly by vegetarian and food-reform societies and partly by wartime rationing pressure, and their usual strategy was exactly this: take a cheap starch, bind it with dairy or egg, season it firmly, and give it the shape and the gravy of a joint. The habit of keeping a jar of raspings by the stove, made from crusts dried out in a cooling oven, is often said to have been common in households long before packaged breadcrumbs existed.