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Ventnor Pudding
(England.) Mince some cold roast beef, and to every pound add 1/2 pound bread-crumbs, soaked in a little stock, a spoonful of butter, a spoonful of curry powder, pepper, celery, salt, and an onion chopped fine. Mix well, pour into a dish, cover with 2 whole eggs, well beaten and seasoned and bake until brown. Serve hot.
A Victorian rechauffé: a way of turning Sunday's cold joint into a hot dish for a weekday. The proportions are sound, but the measurements are vague in the way period books usually are.
- "A spoonful"Read this as a tablespoon in both cases — roughly 1 tbsp butter and 1 tbsp curry powder per pound of beef. A tablespoon of curry powder is assertive; start with two teaspoons if your blend is fresh and hot.
- Celery, salt — or celery saltThe comma is likely a printer's artifact. Either reading works: a stick of finely chopped celery plus salt, or a teaspoon of celery salt. The chopped celery gives more texture and is closer to the spirit of the dish.
- Breadcrumbs and stockHalf a pound of crumbs to a pound of meat is a lot of filler by modern taste. Use soft fresh crumbs rather than dry, and add stock only until they are damp and cohering — a wet mixture bakes to paste.
- Mince, not grindPeriod mincing means chopping by hand or through a coarse plate. A food processor will reduce cold roast beef to a purée in seconds; pulse briefly or chop with a knife.
- Oven temperatureThe recipe gives none. 375-400F should brown the egg topping without drying the beef, which is already fully cooked; check from about 25 minutes.
- The egg toppingTwo beaten eggs poured over the surface set into a thin savoury custard, not a soufflé. Beat them with a spoonful of the stock or a little cream so they spread rather than sit in patches.
- Reheating cooked meatBring the dish through to steaming hot at the centre, above 165F. Cold roast beef that has been sitting in a refrigerator for several days is best not used at all.
- YieldA pound of beef made up this way serves three to four with a green vegetable or a plain potato.
Ventnor is a seaside town on the south coast of the Isle of Wight, popular with Victorian invalids and holidaymakers for its sheltered climate. The recipe belongs to the large nineteenth-century class of réchauffé built on the cold remains of a roast, a matter of thrift in households where a large joint was bought weekly. The curry powder is the tell of its date: commercially blended curry powder was a fixture of the British larder by the mid-1800s, and cookery writers of the period often recommended it as a way to make yesterday's beef taste like something else. Books like this one were arranged as a tour of national dishes.