Kidney Pudding
INGREDIENTS. -3 sheep's kidneys, 1/2 pint of bread-crumbs, 3 oz. of suet, a teacupful of milk, 1 egg, seasoning to taste, of minced parsley, herbs, pepper and salt. AVERAGE COST, 1s. 2d.
Skin the kidneys and mince them and the suet finely. Put them in a basin with the bread-crumbs and cold seasoning to KOUMISS. make the pudding savoury; beat the egg, mix it with the milk, then stir into the other ingredients. Butter a basin, pour in the pudding, cover it with paper and steam for 1 hour. Serve hot with brown sauce or a good gravy.
TIME.-1 hour to steam.
SEASONABLE at any time.
A small steamed savoury pudding of the boarding-house sort: minced kidney and suet bound with crumbs and egg, cooked in a basin rather than a crust. Two points in the printed text are printing accidents rather than instructions.
- Text glitches"KOUMISS." is a stray catchword from the next entry and belongs to no step here. "cold seasoning to make the pudding savoury" is garbled; read it as adding the parsley, herbs, pepper and salt to the cold mixture.
- Sheep's kidneysThese are what a modern butcher sells as lamb's kidneys — three weigh roughly 5-6 oz (150-175 g) trimmed. Halve them, pull off the membrane and cut out the white core and any gristle before mincing, or the pudding will be chewy in patches.
- Half a pint of bread-crumbsA dry measure, not a weight: about 1 1/4 cups of soft white crumbs, roughly 2 1/2 oz (70 g). A teacupful of milk in Beeton-era usage is 5-6 fl oz (150-175 ml); add it gradually, as crumb absorbency varies.
- Suet3 oz of shredded beef suet, from a butcher or a packet. Vegetarian suet behaves the same. Fresh suet needs the papery membrane stripped before mincing, and it minces far more easily chilled.
- The basin and the coverUse a pudding basin of about 1 1/2 pints (900 ml), buttered, filled no more than three-quarters. The "paper" cover keeps condensation out: pleat a round of parchment and a layer of foil together and tie it under the rim so the pudding does not take up water.
- Steaming and donenessAn hour of steady steaming suits a pudding this size — keep the water at a bare simmer, halfway up the basin, and top it up with boiling water. Test with a skewer to the centre; it should come out clean and hot, around 160F (71C). Longer will not improve it, as kidney tightens and goes grainy.
- Brown sauceThis means a made gravy in the espagnole line — browned flour, stock, a little onion — not the bottled condiment. Pan gravy or a good beef stock reduction serves as well.
- YieldEnough for two as a main course with potatoes, or three as part of a larger meal.
Steamed basin puddings, sweet and savoury alike, were the workhorse of the Victorian kitchen: they needed only a pot of simmering water and could sit on the range unattended while other work went on. Offal puddings of this kind used the cheap end of the butcher's counter — Beeton's costing of 1s. 2d. puts this among the household's economical dishes — and the suet supplied both richness and the springy texture that crumbs alone will not give. Kidney's more famous partnership with beef in steak and kidney pudding is the same principle inside a suet crust; this version drops the crust and the beef, leaving the kidney to flavour a plain forcemeat. The note "seasonable at any time" mattered in a book that arranged its recipes by ingredient and class of dish while carrying seasonality notes and monthly bills of fare: sheep's kidneys, unlike game or shellfish, had no closed season.