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Liver Pudding (English)
6 pigs' haslets (heart, liver, etc.) 5 lbs. fat pork 12 onions 1/2 teaspoon sage salt and pepper corn meal Take haslets, look over carefully, removing all imperfect parts. Put into saucepan of water, lightly salted; cook until tender and chop fine. Into another sauce pan put pork, cover with water, boil until tender; take off rind and chop pork fine and add to liver. Throw away the water in which haslets were cooked but save water in which pork was cooked. Put the chopped mixture into the water with onions, chopped fine. Cook until onions are tender, season with powdered sage, salt and pepper and then sift in sufficient corn meal to cook thick. Pour into wet molds and when cold, slice and fry.
This is scrapple by another name: offal and fat pork simmered, chopped, thickened with cornmeal, set firm in pans and fried in slices. The original is written for a farm household butchering its own pigs, so the quantities are enormous.
- HasletA haslet (also harslet, hastlet) is the pluck of a pig — heart, liver, lungs, sometimes spleen and a length of windpipe. Lungs cannot legally be sold for food in the United States; a butcher can generally supply heart and liver, which is what a modern cook will have to work with.
- ScaleSix haslets plus 5 lb of fat pork is a butchering-day batch, many pounds of finished pudding meant to be stored and eaten over weeks. To scale down, divide by six: roughly one heart, one liver, about 12 oz fat pork belly, two onions.
- Fat porkIn books of this period 'fat pork' may mean either fresh fatty pork or salt pork. Here it has a rind, removed after boiling, so a fresh belly or jowl is the closest cut and the safer reading. If you substitute a cured cut the pudding may come out very salty, since the cooking water is kept and used as the liquid.
- Why the liver water is thrown outThe instruction is deliberate, not fussiness. Liver and heart broth turns bitter and metallic; the pork broth is sweet and gelatinous, and it is what carries the cornmeal. Do not consolidate the two pans.
- SeasoningHalf a teaspoon of sage looks very small for a batch this size. Season by taste as the mixture thickens — a scaled-down batch takes about a teaspoon of dried sage, and offal puddings need a firm hand with black pepper.
- CornmealNo quantity is given because the cook judged it: sift in slowly, stirring, until a spoon stands up briefly in the mixture, then cook a further 20 to 30 minutes over low heat so the meal loses its raw taste. Coarse or medium yellow cornmeal is right; fine degerminated meal gives a pasty set.
- Wet moldsRinse loaf pans in cold water and do not dry them — the film of water is what lets the set pudding turn out. Chill uncovered until firm, then refrigerate covered, and use within three or four days or freeze in slices.
- FryingSlice about half an inch thick, straight from cold, and fry in a little lard or oil over medium heat without moving the slices until a crust forms. Warm pudding crumbles apart in the pan; thoroughly cold slices hold.