Pease Pudding
INGREDIENTS for pudding for 7 or 8 persons. -1½ pint of split peas, 2 oz. of butter, pepper and salt to taste. AVERAGE COST, 5d.
Put the peas to soak over-night, in rainwater, and float off any that are worm-eaten or discoloured. Tie them loosely in a clean cloth, leaving a little room for them to swell, and put them on to boil in cold rainwater, allowing 2 hours after the water has simmered up. When the peas are tender, take them up and drain; rub them through a colander with a wooden spoon, add the butter, eggs, pepper and salt; beat all well together for a few minutes, until the ingredients are well incorporated, then tie them tightly in a floured cloth; boil the pudding for another hour, turn it on to the dish, and serve very hot. This pudding should always be sent to table with boiled leg of pork, and is an exceedingly nice accompaniment to boiled beef. pudding is improved by the addition of a couple of eggs, added when the pudding is first taken up.
A straightforward boiled legume pudding, though the ingredient list and method disagree with each other and the cloth technique needs translating for a modern pan.
- The missing eggsThe ingredient list omits eggs, but the method calls for them and the closing line supplies them: a couple of eggs, beaten in after the peas are drained and sieved. They are presented as an improvement rather than an essential; in practice they help the pudding hold together when turned out.
- RainwaterSoft water was specified because hard water toughens the skins of dried pulses and slows softening. Filtered or bottled soft water does the same job; a pinch of bicarbonate in the soaking water is the usual modern workaround in hard-water areas.
- Split peasYellow split peas are the traditional choice, though green work much the same. Modern split peas come cleaner than Victorian stock, so the picking-over for worm-eaten grains is no longer needed, and a soaked pint will usually be tender well inside the two hours specified — often 45 to 60 minutes.
- Measuring the peasAn imperial pint of dry split peas is about 20 fl oz by volume, roughly 1 lb / 450 g. That is a generous quantity and will genuinely feed seven or eight as a side dish.
- The pudding clothBoth boilings use a cloth. For the first, tie loosely so the peas have room to swell; for the second, flour the cloth well and tie tightly so the pudding sets in a firm ball. A muslin or a clean tea towel works. Keep the water at a bare simmer and topped up so the cloth stays submerged.
- A modern shortcutThe second hour of boiling can be replaced by packing the seasoned purée into a buttered pudding basin, covering with pleated foil and steaming for 45 minutes. It turns out cleanly and there is no cloth to wrestle with.
- SeasoningSplit peas absorb a great deal of salt and the recipe leaves it entirely to taste. Season after mashing, when you can judge it, and be more generous than instinct suggests.
Pease pudding belongs to the oldest layer of English cooking, a survivor of the habit of boiling a pudding in a cloth alongside the meat in the same pot, a technique recorded from the early seventeenth century — the nursery rhyme about pease porridge hot, cold, and nine days old is commonly read as pointing to the same dish in its looser form. Dried peas were the staple winter vegetable of the English poor long before the potato took that role, and the pairing with boiled salt pork or beef is functional as much as traditional: the pudding cooked in the meat water and soaked up its fat and salt. It appears here in a general English manual, paired with boiled pork and beef; the strong association with Northern England, and particularly Tyneside, where it is still sold to be eaten with ham, is best understood as a present-day one. The costing of fivepence for a dish serving eight is the point of its inclusion in a Victorian household manual: few things fed a table so cheaply.