Mutton Pudding
INGREDIENTS for dish for 6 persons. About 2½ lbs. of the chump end of a loin of mutton, weighed after being boned, pepper and salt to taste , suet crust made with milk, in the proportion of 6 oz. of suet to each pound of flour; a very small quantity of minced onion (this may be omitted when the flavour is not liked).
Cut the meat into rather thin slices and season them with pepper and salt; line the pudding-dish with crust; lay in the meat, and nearly, but do not quite, fill it up with water; when the flavour is liked, add a small quantity of minced onion; cover with crust, and proceed in the same manner as directed in recipe for rump-steak-andkidney pudding. MUTTON SOUP. lbs., 2 hours; 14 lbs., 3¼ hours. When liked underdone, allow rather less time.
SEASONABLE all the year; not so good when lamb is in full season.
A steamed suet-crust pudding of the plainest English kind. The original leans on two other entries in the book — the steak-and-kidney pudding for the method, and a stray fragment of the mutton soup timings that the printer has run in at the end — so the working detail has to be reassembled.
- The instruction that mattersFill the dish with water nearly, but not quite, to the top, as the original directs; the small gap left is what keeps the liquid from forcing the lid crust loose as the pudding cooks.
- The missing methodThe cross-reference to the rump-steak-and-kidney pudding supplies the working detail: line a buttered pudding basin with about two-thirds of the crust, fill it, damp the edge and press on a lid of pastry, tie a floured cloth over the top, and boil or steam for around three hours, topping the pan up from a kettle. Basin size and exact timing are a modern reconstruction; this entry gives neither.
- The chump endThe thick rear portion of the loin, next to the leg. A butcher will bone it for you; if mutton is unavailable, hogget or a boned lamb loin behaves the same way, though lamb is milder in flavour.
- Suet crust proportionsSix ounces of suet to each pound of flour, so for this size of pudding roughly 12 oz self-raising flour to 4½ oz shredded suet, a good pinch of salt, and enough milk to bring it to a soft but not sticky dough. Packet shredded suet, beef or vegetable, works directly; block suet needs grating from frozen.
- The stray line"lbs., 2 hours; 14 lbs., 34 hours" is scrambled type from a cooking-times entry elsewhere in the book, not part of this pudding; the following sentence about meat "liked underdone" points to a roasting table rather than to the soup heading above it. The lost fractions cannot be recovered with certainty — 34 is presumably 3¼ or ¾ hours.
- Onion"A very small quantity" is not defined; a tablespoon, finely minced and scattered between the layers of meat, is a reasonable reading. The book adds only that it may be left out if the flavour is not liked.
- Seasoning and gravyThe water becomes the gravy, so season the meat more assertively than the bare "pepper and salt to taste" suggests. A dessertspoon of flour tossed with the sliced meat will thicken the liquid slightly during the long steam.
- Yield and servingSix as the book states, though six modern portions from 2 lbs of meat plus crust is generous. Serve straight from the basin with a napkin round it, with plain boiled potatoes and a green vegetable.
Suet-crust puddings boiled or steamed in a basin were the great economical dish of nineteenth-century English households: the crust needed no oven, the long moist cooking made cheap and sinewy cuts tender, and the whole thing could sit over the fire unattended while other work was done. Mutton — conventionally meat from a sheep over two years old, with hogget covering the year between, and much the commoner sheep meat in Britain until the twentieth century — was strong-flavoured and often tough, which is exactly why it suited the method. Beeton's note that the dish is "not so good when lamb is in full season" reflects a market calendar now largely gone: spring lamb displaced mutton on the butcher's block for part of the year, and the older meat lost condition. The entry's dependence on the steak-and-kidney pudding recipe is characteristic of the book, which was built as a cross-referenced household reference rather than a sequence of standalone recipes, and the garbled soup timings tacked onto the end are a reminder that the text as it reaches us is not always reliably set.