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August 26
Menu: Beef Steak Pudding; Spaghetti with Tomato; Potatoes on Half Shell; Green Pepper Salad; Apricot Pudding; Coffee Beef Steak Pudding-Line a Criscoed basin with plain pastry. Mix together on a plate 1 tablespoon flour, 1 teaspoon salt, and 1/2 teaspoon pepper for seasoning. Cut 1 pound lean beef in thin slices, dip them in the seasoning, and place them lightly in the basin; split 1 sheep's kidney, skin and cut in thin slices; dip them also in the seasoning, and put them in basin, and pour over 1 cup of water for gravy. Wet the edges of the paste on basin; roll out a piece of paste large enough to cover the dish; place it on, press down at the edges, and sprinkle a little flour over top. Now dip a pudding cloth in boiling water, tie it tightly over the top, and plunge the pudding in plenty of boiling water; then boil for 3 hours. Remove the cloth, and turn the pudding out on a dish. Liver and bacon mixed, or mutton, makes a good pudding of this kind.
An English steak and kidney pudding rewritten for an American audience with Crisco standing in where a British cook would have used beef suet. Nothing here is difficult, but the seal and the boil are what make or break it.
- The hinge: a real sealWater must not get into the pudding. The recipe's scalded cloth, wrung out and tied tightly, is the method that suits full immersion; pleated parchment and foil tied with string is the modern equivalent for a pudding that is steamed rather than boiled.
- "Criscoed basin"Simply a well-greased pudding basin — a 1 1/2-quart heatproof bowl with a lip. Grease it heavily, right up over the rim, or the crust will stick where it meets the edge.
- Boiling water, kept boilingThe recipe plunges the basin into plenty of boiling water, so it is fully immersed; hold it at a steady rolling boil for the full 3 hours. Top up with boiling water from a kettle as it evaporates; cold water added mid-cook will stall the pudding and can crack the basin.
- The pastry"Plain pastry" made with shortening gives a firm crust that survives 3 hours of steam. Traditional suet crust — self-rising flour with shredded suet, rolled fairly thick — is lighter and easier to turn out if you want the older version.
- Sheep's kidneyLamb kidney is the same thing and is still sold by good butchers; one is roughly 2 to 3 ounces. Halve it, snip out the white core and any fat, and rinse. Veal kidney or an extra 4 ounces of beef chuck substitute cleanly.
- Only one cup of waterThat looks thin, but the sealed crust traps everything the meat gives up, and the flour dredge thickens it into gravy. Do not add more or the pudding will be soupy and may burst the crust.
- The three hours are not negotiableThe meat goes in raw and thinly sliced, so the long boil is what turns the beef and kidney tender. Cutting the time short leaves the filling tough and the underside of the crust raw.
- Turning outRest 5 minutes off the heat, run a knife around the crust, then invert onto a deep dish so the gravy is caught. Yield is 3 to 4 servings; potatoes and a green vegetable are the usual accompaniment.
Steak and kidney pudding is a Victorian British dish — a boiled suet-crust pudding filled with raw meat, descended from the older tradition of pudding cloths and basins that predates reliable domestic ovens, since a pot of boiling water was cheaper and easier to control than a coal-fired oven. Its appearance in a Crisco book from the 1910s is a small piece of advertising: Procter & Gamble's hydrogenated cottonseed shortening, introduced in 1911, was pitched as a clean, odorless replacement for both lard and beef suet, and a pudding whose classic crust depends on suet made a useful demonstration. The "Calendar of Dinners" format — a dated menu for every day of the year, this one for August 27 — was a common device in promotional cookbooks of the period, and it is reasonable to suppose such a format served to keep the product in the kitchen year-round rather than only for special baking.