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Venison Pudding
784. Take steaks of fresh venison, season with salt and pepper, put into a pot with a little fresh butter, and stew in scarcely sufficient water to keep them from scorching; when quite tender, cut the meat from the bones, and set it to cool. Save the gravy, and, when cold, carefully remove all the fat; prepare a paste, three-quarters of a pound of beef suet to two pounds of flour. Roll it out thick, put the venison In it, and pour over gravy to moisten it; close over the paste to form a dumpling, tie in a pudding-cloth, and boil an hour, turning several times; when done, dip into cold water, untie the cloth, and turn out the pudding.
Beef-steak pudding may be made as above.
A two-stage pudding: the venison is stewed tender first, then sealed in a suet crust and boiled in a cloth. The crust does no cooking work here beyond holding the meat and gravy, which is why the boil is short.
- The hinge: cook the meat firstThe filling goes into the paste already tender and cold. Venison put in raw will not soften in an hour of boiling, and warm meat softens the suet crust before it can set.
- Suet paste proportionsThree-quarters of a pound of suet to two pounds of flour is about 340 g suet to 900 g flour, roughly 1 part suet to 2.7 parts flour by weight. Add cold water to a firm, rollable dough. That quantity makes a large pudding, enough for eight or so.
- Suet todayFresh beef suet from a butcher should be grated frozen and any membrane discarded. Packaged shredded suet, beef or vegetable, works directly and is easier to distribute.
- Which cut of venison"Steaks" here are on the bone, since the recipe has you cut the meat from the bones afterwards. Shoulder or neck suits the long stew better than loin, which has little connective tissue and tends to dry out, and it gives the gelatinous gravy the recipe depends on.
- Stewing the meatBarely covered with water and lidded, shoulder venison needs 1½ to 2½ hours at a bare simmer. Chilling the gravy to lift the fat off is worth doing properly; venison fat sets hard and tastes tallowy in the finished pudding.
- Moistening, not fillingAdd only enough gravy to wet the meat. A pudding boiled with loose liquid inside will leak through the seam or burst the crust.
- The pudding clothScald the cloth, wring it, flour the inside face well, then tie it leaving a little slack for expansion. Keep the pot at a steady rolling boil and top up with boiling water so the pudding is never uncovered. Turning it, as directed, stops the base sitting flat against the pan.
- A basin insteadA pudding basin large enough to take the full quantity of paste and meat, lined with the paste, covered with pleated parchment and foil and steamed, gives the same result with far less risk of a leaking seam.
- The cold-water dipA few seconds in cold water shrinks the cloth away from the crust so it peels off cleanly rather than tearing the surface.
Boiled suet puddings were a staple of English-language cookery from the seventeenth century onward, and the meat pudding — crust and filling boiled together in a floured cloth — is older than the general use of the pudding basin. The closing line, that beef steak may be treated the same way, points to the far commoner dish this is modelled on; steak pudding was the everyday version, and venison the occasion. Chilling the gravy to lift off the fat was a routine habit of the period, when cooking fats were handled deliberately rather than left to muddy a sauce.