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Beefsteak Pudding
Mix one quart of flour, one pound of suet, shredded fine, a little salt and cold water to make a stiff paste as for pie crust; roll out half an inch thick; season the steak well with pepper and salt, lay it on the paste, add a sliced onion (if liked) and a few raw oysters; roll up, tie in a cloth and boil three hours.
A boiled suet-crust pudding of the English kind, set down in shorthand for cooks who already knew the method. The quantities for the meat are missing, and the cloth is the part most likely to defeat a modern kitchen.
- The crust, in modern measuresA quart of flour is about 4 cups (roughly 1 lb 2 oz); with 1 lb of suet that is close to equal weights of flour and fat, richer than the usual suet crust of two parts flour to one of suet. Cold water is added a little at a time until it just holds together as a stiff, barely tacky dough.
- SuetBeef kidney fat from a butcher, shredded on the coarse side of a grater while very cold, is what is meant. Packaged shredded suet works directly; vegetable shortening does not give the same set crumb but will hold the pudding together.
- How much steakNo weight is given. For this quantity of pastry, allow 1 1/2 to 2 lb of a cut that likes long moist cooking — chuck, skirt or blade — cut into strips or 1-inch cubes rather than left whole, so it cooks evenly and the pudding can be sliced.
- The oystersThree hours of boiling will reduce raw oysters to rubber. They are most likely here for their liquor, which enriches the gravy, and if you want that effect it is better had from a splash of their brine. 'A few' is all the recipe specifies.
- Rolling and sealingHalf an inch is correct for a boiled crust; thinner and it splits, thicker and the centre stays pasty. Whether rolled like a roly-poly, as written, or lined into a greased basin with a lid of pastry, the seam must be pinched hard and the whole thing wrapped loosely enough to allow the paste to swell.
- The clothA pudding cloth is scalded, wrung out, floured on the inside, then tied with string leaving room for expansion. A 2-quart pudding basin covered with pleated parchment and foil and tied under the rim is the easier modern equivalent, steamed rather than submerged.
- Three hours of boilingThe water must stay at a steady, unbroken simmer and must be topped up from the kettle with boiling water — cold water added mid-cook makes the crust heavy. If the pot goes off the boil the pudding absorbs water and collapses.
- YieldServes six generously, and needs nothing but the gravy it makes inside itself and a plain boiled vegetable.
Boiled beefsteak pudding is the older, more rustic cousin of steak pie: before every household had a reliable oven, a suet crust boiled over the fire in a cloth was how a tough cut of beef became a substantial dinner. The oysters are the period detail worth noticing. Through much of the nineteenth century oysters were cheap and plentiful on both sides of the Atlantic, used to stretch and season beef rather than to grace it, and steak-and-oyster pudding appears in English cookery books alongside the kidney version.