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Roast Turkeys, Guinea Fowl, and Chickens. 147
them the following filling:- Mix half a pound of blanched almonds cut into seven or eight bits, with a pound of grated bread, two pounds of marrow or suet, a pound of currants, some beaten cinnamon, cloves, mace, and nutmeg, a quart of cream, the yolks of six and whites of two eggs, a little orange-flower water, a little fine Lisbon sugar, and some lemon-peel and citron sliced, and half fill the skins. To know whether properly flavoured, warm a little in a pannikin. In boiling, much care must be taken to prevent the puddings from bursting. Prick them with a small fork as they rise, and boil them in milk and water. Lay them in a table-cloth till cold.
A sweet boiled pudding forced into sausage skins — closer to a white pudding or a boudin blanc than to anything a modern cook would call pudding. The instruction that matters is the one about half filling: the bread and cream swell hard, and an over-packed skin will split every time.
- SkinsNatural hog casings, bought salted from a butcher or online, rinsed and soaked before use. The original assumes the cook has just emptied and scraped them at home; today they arrive ready.
- Half fill, and no moreThis is not caution for its own sake. Bread and cream expand as they heat, and a full casing bursts in the pot. Tie loosely in lengths and leave slack at both ends.
- Grated breadDry-ish fresh breadcrumbs from a close-textured white loaf, grated on a box grater rather than blitzed to dust. A pound is roughly 8 cups of loose crumb.
- Marrow or suetTwo pounds is the period proportion and it is a great deal of fat by modern taste; shredded beef suet is the practical substitute, and marrow from split beef bones the authentic one. Halving the fat gives a firmer, less rich pudding.
- Fine Lisbon sugarA pale, soft, slightly moist cane sugar that reached Britain by way of Portugal (the sugar itself usually Brazilian). Light brown or golden caster sugar stands in. "A little" here reads as a seasoning rather than a sweetener.
- A quart of creamAn imperial quart is 40 fl oz, about 5 US cups (an earlier English quart may have been smaller). Single cream, or a mixture of whole milk and heavy cream, is probably closer to period cream than modern heavy cream alone.
- CitronCandied citron peel, sold in blocks or diced for fruitcake. Candied lemon peel is the nearest easy replacement.
- PannikinA small metal cup or pan. Frying a spoonful in a skillet to taste for spice and salt before filling the skins is exactly the same test used for sausage today.
- BoilingKeep the milk-and-water bath at a bare shiver, never a rolling boil, and prick each pudding with a small fork as it swells, as the recipe directs. No time is given; something like 30-40 minutes for a pudding of sausage thickness is a reasonable guess, and they are done when firm to the touch.
- Cooling and servingLaid in a cloth to cool, they set firm; puddings of this kind were often sliced and fried or grilled to serve, though the recipe does not say so. Made in full, the mixture fills a great many skins — a quarter batch is sensible for a household.
Sweet puddings boiled in skins are a long-running strand in British cookery, from medieval almond dishes through the seventeenth-century "white puddings" to the plum and Christmas puddings of later centuries. Almonds, currants, marrow, cream, cinnamon, mace and orange-flower water overlap with the flavourings of a mince pie of the same period, when spiced fruit and beef fat were not sharply divided into savoury or sweet. Lisbon sugar and citron reflect the trade in sugar shipped by way of Portugal and in Mediterranean candied peel reaching Britain by sea; both fell out of common use as refined white sugar became cheap. That the mixture was tested by warming a spoonful before the skins were filled suggests how much of this cookery ran on the cook's palate rather than on written measure.