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Kidney and Oyster Pudding
(England.) Clean, parboil, and slice 4 lamb's kidneys, add 1 pint of oysters and their juice, some butter, salt, pepper, and parsley. Cook and stir until tender, then make a batter as for pudding, roll it out and cover a bowl, lining it first with this, and filling with the oysters and kidney. Tie a cloth over all, and boil it about an hour, drain it, and serve with white sauce. Or the batter can be boiled, then slit open and filled with the oysters, etc. This way makes the kidneys and oysters more tender. Add the yolk of an egg to the gravy before pouring it in.
A boiled suet-crust pudding of the steak-and-kidney family, with oysters standing in for the beef. The original is terse about the crust and generous about the cooking time, which is where most of the trouble lies.
- The oysters are the hingeOysters that spend a full hour at boiling temperature turn to rubber. Cook the filling only until the kidney is just done and the oysters have plumped and their edges ruffled, roughly two minutes for the oysters, then stop. If you use the second method given at the end — boiling the crust empty and filling it afterwards — the oysters are barely cooked at all, which is why the recipe says it makes them more tender. That is the better route.
- "Batter as for pudding"Not a pourable batter. A pudding you roll out and line a bowl with is a suet crust: about 2 cups flour, 1 teaspoon baking powder, a good pinch of salt, 4 oz shredded suet (frozen grated butter works), and cold water to a soft but rollable dough. Roll to a scant 1/4 inch, line a buttered 1 1/2-quart pudding basin, reserve a round for the lid.
- Cloth and basinModern practice is a pleated round of parchment then foil over the basin, tied under the rim, rather than a floured cloth. Either way the basin must sit on a trivet or folded towel in the pan, with boiling water reaching halfway up, lid on, topped up from the kettle as it falls.
- TimingOne hour is short for a filled suet pudding of this size; 1 1/2 to 2 hours of steady simmering gives a properly set crust. If you are boiling the crust empty to fill later, 1 hour is about right.
- Lamb's kidneysFour is roughly 6 to 8 oz. Split them, cut out the white core and any fat, and soak briefly in salted water or milk before the parboil to draw off the ammoniac edge. They cook in minutes; a hard boil makes them grainy.
- A pint of oystersAbout 16 to 24 shucked oysters with their liquor, close to two of the 8 oz tubs sold today. Save the liquor — it is most of the seasoning, and it belongs in the white sauce.
- The egg yolkBeat the yolk with a spoonful of the hot gravy first, then stir it back off the heat. Returned to a boiling pan it will scramble and the sauce will look curdled.
- YieldFour generous servings as a main course. Serve directly from the basin or turn it out onto a warm dish; the recipe calls simply for a plain white sauce, and loosening it with the oyster liquor is a modern addition.
Boiled suet puddings filled with meat were the workhorse of the nineteenth-century English kitchen: a basin, a cloth, and a pot of water gave a hot dinner with no oven at all, which mattered in households cooking over a single range or open fire. Oysters appear here not as a luxury but as ballast — it is often said that, until the beds around Britain were fished out late in the century, they were cheap enough to pad out beef and kidney fillings, and the pairing survives in steak, kidney and oyster pudding to this day. This version, headed simply "(England.)", belongs to a genre of cookbooks that collected dishes from abroad for home cooks, which explains the compressed, almost telegraphic instructions: the compiler assumed the reader already knew what a pudding crust was and how to tie a cloth over a basin.