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Pudding Genoese
(Budino alla genovese) Chop together a slice of veal, some chicken breast and two slices of ham and then grind or better pound them, with a small piece of butter, a tablespoonful of grated cheese and a crumb of bread soaked with milk. Rub through a sieve and add three tablespoonfuls of Balsamella (see No. 54) which you will make thick enough for this dish, three eggs and just a taste of nutmeg, mixing everything well.
Take a smooth mold, grease it evenly with butter and put on the bottom a sheet of paper, cut according to the shape of the bottom and equally greased with butter. Pour over the above ingredients and cook in a vessel immersed in boiling water (double boiler). When taken from the mold, remove the paper and in its place put a gravy formed with chopped chicken giblets cooked in brown stock. Serve hot.
A savory meat custard steamed in a mold — closer to a French quenelle forcemeat than to a dessert pudding. The recipe gives no weights, so treat the proportions as a ratio and work from the binder.
- Quantities are genuinely unstated"A slice of veal, some chicken breast and two slices of ham" is not a measurement. A workable reading is about 12 oz total meat, roughly half veal, a quarter chicken breast, a quarter ham, to three eggs and three tablespoons of thick béchamel.
- BalsamellaThis is besciamella, plain béchamel: butter and flour cooked together with milk whisked in. "Thick enough for this dish" means a stiff paste that holds its shape on the spoon, roughly double the flour of a pouring sauce, since it is here as a binder rather than a sauce.
- Pounding, then sievingThe mortar-and-sieve routine exists to get a paste with no fibers. A food processor does it in a minute; pulse the cold meat with the butter, cheese and soaked bread, then still push it through a sieve or fine drum if you want the old smoothness.
- The bread"A crumb of bread soaked with milk" is a panade — about a thick slice of stale crumb, no crust, soaked and squeezed nearly dry. Too much milk left in it and the pudding weeps.
- The mold and the paperA "smooth mold" is a plain straight-sided charlotte mold or any 1-quart metal form without fluting, which would tear the custard. The buttered paper cut to the bottom is a parchment round; it lifts away cleanly after unmolding so the gravy can be spooned onto the exposed surface.
- How to cook it"A vessel immersed in boiling water" is a bain-marie, not a double boiler in the modern sense -- set the covered mold in a deep pan with water reaching halfway up and hold it at a bare simmer. Boiling hard will curdle the eggs and pit the surface.
- DonenessReckon 45 to 60 minutes for a quart mold. It is set when the center reaches 170F and a skewer comes out clean; rest it 10 minutes before turning out or it will slump.
- The gravyChicken livers, hearts and gizzards, chopped fine and simmered in brown stock until the stock is syrupy. It is meant to be sparse and dark, poured over the top rather than pooled around.
- YieldA quart mold serves four to six as a first course.
Budino in nineteenth-century Italian cookery covered any bound, molded preparation, sweet or savory, and this one belongs to the family of pounded forcemeat puddings. Maria Gentile's Italian Cook Book of 1919 drew a great deal of its material from Pellegrino Artusi's La scienza in cucina e l'arte di mangiar bene (1891) for American readers, and the numbered-recipe system follows Artusi's habit. The Genoese attribution is loose and should be read as traditional rather than documented. What the recipe does record precisely is technique: the mortar, the sieve, the buttered paper round and the bain-marie.