Home › Meat Recipes › Bombshell
Bombshell
½ lbs. tender steak ½ oz. (2 tablespoonfuls) flour 1 teaspoonful salt 1½ teaspoonful pepper 3/4 lb. (3 cups) flour 1/2 teaspoonful baking soda 1/2 teaspoonful cream of tartar 2 ozs. (4 tablespoonfuls) butter Milk 1/2 pint (I cup) water Cut the steak into small pieces. Mix the two tablespoonfuls of flour with the salt and pepper and roll the pieces of steak in this mixture. Sift the flour, baking soda, cream of tartar, and salt and pepper to taste into a basin, rub in the butter and mix into a firm paste with a little milk.
Cut the paste into two pieces, one large and one small. Roll out the larger piece and line a wellbuttered mold with it. Put in the pieces of steak with the water. Roll out the smaller piece of paste and lay it on the top. Cover with a piece of buttered paper and steam steadily for three hours. Turn out on to a hot dish and serve.
Bombshell was the name given to this meat pudding in 1820 by an old soldier.
A British steamed steak pudding under a butter crust rather than the usual suet. The ingredient list has come through the printer badly, so read the notes before shopping.
- Steak quantityThe steak weight was checked against the printed page and matches what our text gives. Chuck or blade works well here; cut it into one-inch pieces before flouring.
- And so is the pepperAnd the pepper may be too -- 1½ teaspoonfuls of pepper in two tablespoons of seasoning flour reads like a misprint for ½ teaspoon, on the same pattern as the other garbled figures. Season the flour as you normally would.
- Soda and cream of tartarTogether these are simply a homemade baking powder. Half a teaspoon of each is roughly equivalent to about 1 teaspoon of modern baking powder sifted into the 3 cups of flour.
- "Tender steak" is a red herringThree hours of steaming will reduce a good sirloin to threads. Braising cuts with connective tissue are what you want here; they give body to the small amount of gravy the pudding makes.
- The moldA 1½ to 2 quart pudding basin or heatproof bowl. Butter it thoroughly, line with the larger piece of pastry leaving a slight overhang, and pinch the lid to it firmly so the crust seals.
- Covering itThe buttered paper stands in for a pleated sheet of parchment plus foil, tied under the rim. The pleat matters: the crust rises, and a tight cover will tear.
- Steaming steadilySet the basin on a trivet or folded cloth in a deep pan with boiling water halfway up the sides, lid on, at a bare simmer. Check every 45 minutes and top up with boiling water; if the pan runs dry the pudding scorches and the crust splits.
- Turning outRest it five minutes off the heat before inverting, and have the plate warm. If the seal has failed, serve it from the basin rather than fighting it.
- YieldFour generous servings. The cup of water becomes a thin gravy inside, so mashed potato or a plain green vegetable is the right accompaniment.
Steamed and boiled meat puddings were among the great economies of the British kitchen: a tough cut, a cheap crust, one pot on the fire and no oven needed, which mattered in households that had no oven at all. Steak pudding is normally built on a suet crust, and this version's use of butter with soda and cream of tartar suggests a date after chemical raising agents came into domestic use, though that places it only loosely, since their adoption was gradual. The claim that an old soldier christened it "Bombshell" in 1820 is the sort of story often attached to a dish, and should be taken as traditional rather than documented; the name is at least descriptive, since a pudding turned out of a basin is round, dark and heavy enough to look the part.