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Beefsteak and Kidney Pudding
Cut some long rump steaks into pieces about a quarter of an inch thick, sprinkle over them some salt, pepper and flour. Chop up a beef kidney into seven or eight pieces, and place together with the meat in a buttered basin lined with suet-crust, pour over a little water or weak stock, and cover with a flat of paste, fastening it all around the edge. Tie a well floured cloth over the basin, put in a saucepan of water and boil for two hours, adding more water if necessary. When done, turn the pudding carefully into a dish, and serve very hot.
A boiled suet pudding of the English kind, written in the shorthand of a professional kitchen where the crust and the basin needed no explanation. The details it leaves out are the ones that decide whether it turns out whole.
- The hinge: a watertight sealThe lid of paste must be pressed onto a moistened rim and the cloth tied tight below the basin's lip, or water gets in and the pudding is boiled soup. Modern practice is pleated parchment and foil under string, with a handle of string across the top for lifting.
- Suet crust proportionsThe book assumes you know it: roughly 2 parts self-raising flour to 1 part shredded beef suet by weight, a good pinch of salt, and cold water to a soft dough. Three-quarters lines a 1.5-quart (1.4 L) basin; the rest rolls out for the lid.
- "A buttered basin"A pudding basin is a ceramic bowl with sloping sides and a rim. The book gives no size; something around 1.5 quarts suits this quantity. A stainless or Pyrex bowl of the same volume works; butter it well or the pudding will not turn out.
- "A flat of paste"Simply a disc of the same suet dough rolled to fit the top, not a separate pastry.
- Two hours is the floorTiming -- Two hours, as given, is at the short end for raw beef; many cooks allow 3 to 4 hours of steady boiling for the suet crust to set light and the steak to go fully tender. Thin quarter-inch slices in a modest basin can manage in the time stated, and longer does no harm.
- Boiling water levelThe water should come no more than two-thirds up the basin and must never go off the boil or drop below halfway. Keep a kettle on to top up with boiling, not cold, water.
- The kidneyBeef kidney needs the white core cut out and the pieces soaked in cold salted water or milk for an hour, then rinsed, or the finished pudding tastes strongly of ammonia. Lamb kidneys are milder and easier to buy.
- "A little water or weak stock"The book says only 'a little': enough to moisten, not to fill. The meat throws off more liquid as it cooks and an overfilled basin will burst its seal, so leave a half-inch of headroom under the lid.
- Yield and servingServes 4 to 6. Let it stand five minutes off the heat before turning out, and have extra hot gravy on the side, since the pudding's own liquor is scant.
Steak and kidney pudding is English rather than continental, and its presence in Oscar Tschirky's book is a reminder of how thoroughly British cooking furnished the American hotel menu around 1900 — the Waldorf served a clientele that expected chops, joints and boiled puddings alongside the French repertoire. Suet-crust puddings boiled in a cloth are much older than the beef-and-kidney filling; the technique goes back to the seventeenth century, while the steak and kidney combination is generally traced to Victorian England and appears in the household manuals of the mid-1800s. The pie version, baked in shortcrust, is the same filling under a different roof and is usually the later, more urban form. Oscar's terseness here is characteristic of the book: he wrote for cooks who already knew how to line a basin, and recorded only what distinguished one dish from another.