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Pickled Pork and Peas Pudding
Soak the pork all night in cold water and wash and scrape it clean; put it on early in the day, as it will take a long time to boil, and it must boil slowly. Skim it frequently. Boil in a separate pot, greens or cabbage to eat with it, also parsnips and potatoes. Peas pudding is a frequent accompaniment to pickeled pork, and is liked. To make a small pudding have ready a quart of dried split peas, which have been soaked all night in cold water, tie them in a cloth (leaving room for them to swell), and boil them slowly until they are tender; drain them and rub them through a sieve into a deep dish, season them with pepper and salt, and mix them with an ounce of butter and two beaten eggs; beat all well together until thoroughly mixed; dip a cloth in hot water, sprinkle it with flour, and put the pudding into it. Tie it up very tightly, leaving a small space between the mixture and the tying (as the pudding will still swell a little), and boil it an hour longer. Serve with the pork.
Two dishes in one entry: a slow-simmered joint of salt-cured pork and the split-pea pudding boiled in a cloth alongside it. Nothing here is difficult, but the vocabulary and the quantities need translating.
- Never let it boilDespite the wording, the pork should sit at a bare simmer, 180-190F, with the surface barely trembling. A rolling boil squeezes the muscle fibres and gives you dry, stringy meat inside a cloudy, over-salted broth.
- What "pickled pork" isSalt-cured, not vinegar-pickled: a joint of belly, shoulder or hock held in brine, close to what a butcher now sells as salt pork, pork hock or an uncooked gammon-style cut. The overnight soak in cold water is not optional, since it draws out enough salt to make the meat and its broth palatable. Change the water once if you can.
- Cooking timeFigure 25-30 minutes per pound after the water comes up to temperature, so roughly 2 to 2 1/2 hours for a 5 lb joint. It is done when a skewer slides through the thickest part with no resistance. Skimming in the first twenty minutes is what keeps the liquid clean.
- A quart of split peasThat is roughly 1 3/4 to 2 lb dry, which swells to a great deal of pudding: enough for eight to ten servings alongside the meat. Half the quantity is more realistic for a modern table.
- The two boilingsThe peas cook in the cloth first, 1 to 1 1/2 hours for soaked split peas, until they collapse. Only after they are sieved, seasoned and bound with butter and egg do they go back into a fresh floured cloth for the second hour. The eggs are what set the mixture into something sliceable.
- Instead of a sieveRubbing hot peas through a sieve is the slow step. A food mill or a few pulses in a food processor does the same job; avoid a blender, which turns them to glue.
- The pudding clothUse unbleached cotton or muslin, dipped in hot water as the recipe says, wrung out and dusted with flour so the surface seals rather than sticks. A pudding basin covered with pleated parchment and foil, set in a pan of simmering water, works equally well and is easier to handle. Leave the slack the recipe asks for either way.
- ServingThe greens, parsnips and potatoes are boiled separately, as the original says, then dressed with butter. Some of the pork liquor is worth tasting before you use it to moisten anything; if the joint was heavily brined it will be too salty.
Pickled pork with peas pudding is old English household cooking, the kind of one-pot dinner built around a barrel of salt pork and a sack of dried peas, both of which kept for months without ice. Split peas boiled in a cloth appear in British cookery under the name pease pudding well before the nineteenth century, and the dish is still associated particularly with the north-east of England, where it is eaten with ham and bacon joints. The instruction to "put it on early in the day" belongs to a kitchen with a range that was lit anyway, where a pot at the back cost nothing to keep going.