Pudding & Pie

From Loretta:

It just keeps snowing.  As of yesterday, this part of Massachusetts had 20 inches.  By tomorrow, we are likely see over two feet.  I am learning to use my new camera, and below, here and there, you'll see my winter wonderland experiments.

It's good weather for thinking about food.  Frankly, after a week of baking cookies, I'd rather think about food than prepare it.  Last time, on my chicken blog, some of the U.S. readers expressed curiosity about English puddings.  I have since had a little time to delve into The New Female Instructor or Young Woman's Guide to Domestic Happiness, first published in 1834.  Turns out there are many varieties of puddings.  The puddings are cooked in a cloth, which must be scrupulously clean.  It is dampened with boiling water and lightly coated with flour, and depending on what kind of pudding you put into it, you tie it either closely or loosely.  Everyone clear on that?

Puddings are divided into two categories, Boiled Puddings and Baked Puddings.  There are both sweet and savory varieties, but mainly sweet.

One of the Boiled Puddings listed is Marrow Pudding:  Grate a small loaf into crumbs, and pour on them a pint of boiling hot cream.  Cut a pound of beef marrow very thin, beat up four eggs well, and then add a glass of brandy, with sugar and nutmeg to your taste.  Mix them all well together, and boil it three quarters of an hour.  Cut two ounces of citron into very thin bits, and when you dish up your pudding, stick them all over it.

My sense is that the beef marrow is used much in the way suet is used in a number of dishes, as the fat element. There's a recipe for Suet Dumplings, among others.

Here's the Potatoe (yes, that's how it's spelled in the book) Pudding, which sounds quite tasty: 

Boil half a pound of potatoes till they are soft, then peel them, mash them with the back of a spoon, and rub them through a sieve to have them fine and smooth.  Then take half a pound of fresh butter melted, half a pound of fine sugar, and beat them well together till they are quite smooth.  Beat up six eggs, whites as well as yolks, and stir them in with a glass of sack or brandy.  Pour it into your cloth, tie it up, and about half an hour will do it.  When you take it out, melt some butter, put into it a glass of wine sweetened with sugar, and pour it over your pudding.

I loved studying these recipes because they were created before anyone ever heard of cholesterol.  This is also the case with Albanian cooking, which always makes me wonder where they got the idea the Mediterranean diet keeps you slim.  Or was it just my family that used butter so lavishly?

We have a savory pie called, depending on where you come from, Lakror or Byrek.  (the y is pronounced like the German ü.)  It's made in large pans, something like the size of a pizza pan.  The crust is made of several layers of paper-thin dough, well coated with clarified butter.  It can be filled with various mixtures: cottage & cream cheese, ground beef, lamb & onions, leeks & cottage & cream cheese, onions & cottage cheese, scallions & cottage cheese, spinach & the cheeses, squash.  One might add or substitute feta cheese to some of these mixtures.  My favorite is a version with a slightly different crust, involving more oil & less butter, and filled with a tomato & onion mixture.  Like most Albanian dishes (like most delicious food, actually), the pie is labor intensive.  But experienced Albanian cooks can make several in a few hours.  In the old country, they'd probably take the pie to the local baker & have it baked in a wood-fired oven.  IIRC, a great many kitchens did not and still do not have ovens.

Food gets people excited, and we tend to have strong opinions.  As I trolled the Internet, looking for recipes & pictures, I came upon this lively discussion.

One of the comments seems to refer to some recipes I found here.

I too found the recipes odd.  My family does not put cinnamon in baklava, for instance, and I never heard of anyone putting mint in the meatballs (qoftë).  Maybe someone somewhere confused mint with parsley, and the error traveled round the Internet, as often happens.

Of course, everyone expects the food to taste the way Mum or Gram made it or the way it tasted in Korcë or Tirana or Permet or Pogradec or wherever one's family came from.  But Albania is very mountainous and used to have vast stretches of swampland.  Villages tended to be isolated.  Thus, even though it's a small country with a small population, there's tremendous variety in the cuisine and in the way any one dish is prepared.  I have a tattered cookbook put together decades ago by the local church.  It has three different methods for making the Lakror/Byrek crust--and the various members of my family who make it not only don't make it any of these ways, but do it differently from one another.  And equally deliciously in their separate ways, by the way.

If you'd like another fine example of Albanian Heart Punch Execution Cooking, check out perpeq.

I leave you with a dish my mother makes at holidays, a sweet stuffing called Drop (the o is a longish one, like the o in adore).  I have clear memories of breaking up the stale bread for my grandmother, who was very particular about the kind of bread and the size pieces it had to be.  She never used or wrote a recipe.  Neither does my mother.  This one comes from a church cookbook, and I think it may be a good starting point:

2 loaves day old bread
1-1/2 cups butter
1 cup raisins
1 cup chopped walnuts
sugar (Mum adds secret sweet ingredients she won’t reveal even to her children)

Break bread into small pieces.  Melt butter in large pot.  Add bread and cook until golden brown.  Add raisins, nuts, and sugar.  Serve with turkey or chicken.  Note:  For more flavor, add two tablespoons of turkey or chicken drippings.

Since I haven't a holiday book to give away, I'll let the winning commenter choose a Loretta Chase book from those I have available.

Happy Holidays!

Comments

[Pam P]

Loretta, that potato pudding sounds interesting, first I've ever heard of it. My sister is always looking for something different to try, I'll have to give her this and maybe get to sample it then.

Happy Holidays!

[Maggie Robinson]

I am feeling sinful. Although I baked loaves of my internationally famous (we hosted several foreign exchange students) lemon tea bread last weekend during the big snowstorm, I am not really getting in the kitchen again except to wash dishes. My family is coming Sunday for a spaghetti dinner which my husband is preparing (he makes the best meatballs) and one of my daughters is entertaining us the next two nights. I have no desire to make anything from any culture. But I am hoping my middle daughter brings the box of Mediterranean/Middle Eastern pastries she gets from one of her accounts. Talk about baklava. Yum.

[kay]

Mint Meatballs, I used to work with a woman who was married to a man from Greece. Every Christmas she made these absolutely wonderful meatballs with mint in them. I miss her and her meatballs.

[Maya]

the description of Loretta's mum and grandmum reminds me of how shocked (and more than a little insulted) i was when i first got married and my new husband, who was supposed to be impressed by the good faith i was showing by actually hauling out the ccokbooks we had received as wedding gifts and trying to apply them, and instead said something to the effect of 'using cookbooks is cheating. you're supposed to have everything in your head'. the really aggravating thing about it was that he wasn't just being hypocritical - he still is the better cook between us, and does it by feel and memory.

[Maureen]

Happy Holidays Loretta!
Your post has made me hungry but there's a couple more hours until lunch. This time of year it is always fun to try new foods and still have the ones we serve every year. Of course, this amounts to a tremendous amount of calories.

[RevMelinda]

Hi Loretta,

Just down the road from you at Mount Holyoke College (my alma mater) they make a steamed pudding called "Deacon Porter's Hat." Its featured ingredient is blackstrap molasses, and it has raisins, cinnamon,cloves, and nutmeg in it, too.
http://chef.mtholyoke.edu/foodpro/label.asp?locationNum=35&locationName=Rocky+&dtdate=11%2F4%2F2007&RecNumAndPort=189520*1%2F10

The thing about Deacon Porter's Hat is that it MUST be steamed in a cylinder (e.g., a tin can) and presented at the table standing up like a stovepipe hat, admired, and then can be sliced and eaten with a hard sauce.

The dessert is named for an early college trustee, Deacon Andrew Porter, who was known for his stovepipe hat.

Although I can't find any authentication on the web at the moment, we were told that Deacon Porter's Hat was served on Founder's Day because he said "If this college succeeds I'll eat my hat," or some such.

Merry Christmas!
Melinda

[NinaP]

Merry Christmas, Loretta!

The Potatoe pudding sounds good. What type of cloth was used? How is it boiled? I'm imagining (courtesy of The Christmas Carol) that it was tied to a spoon which was laid across the pot.

Thanks,
Nina

[Elaine McCarthy]

All the traditional Christmas delicacies sound wonderful, but I am too full to even think about trying any of them. Between the office lunch, the company dinner, the meals out because I'm too tired to cook, the pannetone, lebkuchen and peanut brittle at home, and the ever-present gifts of candy, cookies, and more candy, I am positively LOOKING FORWARD to Lent!

[LorettaChase]

Pam P: If your sister figures out what kind of cloth it is and how one uses it, I'd love to know.__Maggie, I envy you. At this point I'd much rather wash dishes than cook. But I've got miles of cookies to go before I sleep.__Kay: I think, but can't be sure, that Greek--and Lebanese & Syrian, etc--cooking uses more mint than Albanian does. But for all I know there may be areas of Albania where mint is integral to the meatballs, and many other dishes.__Maya, I think cooking is like other abilities. Like musical skill, for instance. Some people have perfect pitch. Most don't. Count me as one who usually cooks with recipes, though I do tinker with them.__Maureen, I'm hoping all the snow shoveling will burn up the extra calories, but I doubt it.__RevMelinda, that sounds delicious! I'll bet someone here knows something about pudding steamed in a cylinder. Yes? Anybody?__Nina, The Female Instructor assumes we know what kind of cloth & what to do with it. If anyone can offer further detail, please feel free to enlighten us.__ Elaine, I think of fasting sometimes...but then I get a whiff of pie...

[Michelle]

My Lithuanian nanny (grandmother) cooked like your grandmother, Loretta. She never used a recipe. It makes it very challenging to try to recreate her best dishes.

What does IIRC mean?

[Jane]

I always hear about plum pudding in books. Would this pudding be boiled or baked?

[jeanne]

Would it be cheesecloth? Most of these are strange sounding foods to me (I'm Italian decent) but I do try to give new things a try.

[Susan Wilbanks]

That potato pudding sounds vaguely reminiscent of potato candy, which some of the church ladies in my hometown made when I was growing up:

http://southernfood.about.com/od/candyrecipes/r/blbb158.htm

Only the candy had peanut butter and lacked brandy and wine.

I'd love to try to attempt an English pudding one of these days. I have the LOBSCOUSE AND SPOTTED DOG cookbook, which was inspired by the Aubrey/Maturin books, and it's full of exotically named puddings. I have this vision of serving a full-on Regency meal, with the finale either Floating Islands or a Boiled Baby.

Unfortunately, I'm not that good of a cook, so my Regency dinner will probably remain a vision only.

[LorettaChase]

Michelle, it was such a different world. Our grandmothers simply learned from their mothers & grandmothers. My grandmother did try to teach me, but I had one foot in the old world and one foot in the new, and the knowledge didn't survive. IIRC is an acronym for “If I remember correctly.” Here’s a site that lists the more common Internet acronyms.
http://www.al6400.com/resources/acronyms.shtml
__Jane, plum pudding is listed in The New Female Instructor as a boiled pudding.__ Jeanne, I find an answer in Lobscouse & Spotted Dog. Patrick O’Brian said they used sailcloth. The modern method the authors suggest is “any square kitchen towel or similar piece of smooth cotton cloth.” But it needs to be large. They use 30” square flour-sacking towels.__ Susan, I think a lot of this cooking is very labor intensive, and most of us simply don’t have that kind of time. And I doubt I have the necessary cooking skill, either--or the patience, for that matter.

[Mary Jo Putney]

Oh, yum, I want to sample! Loretta, I don't think that Albanian cooking qualifies as Mediterranean if the fat used is butter instead of olive oil. But it sure sounds heart-attack good.

I've had Mid-Eastern meatballs with mint, and definitely delicious. When we ate at that Turkish restaurant in NYC, you explained some of the similarities and differences of Turkish and Albanian. I imagine that there is a continuum of regional cooking. Albania would certainly be influenced by all those years of Turkish domination, but lots of regional variations. I imagine those rugged mountains were better for pasture (and butter) then for olive trees.

I like to cook, but I'll generally follow a recipe closely the first time through to establish a baseline before I start variations. (Or decide it's not worth doing again.)

Susan W.--wouldn't it be fun if we had enough Regency writers in one place to do a Regency potluck! That way, each of us would only have to wrestle with one recipe. I'd claim the potroast, since that would probably be the least complicated. :)

Mary Jo

[Jo Beverley]

Yes, a pudding cloth can be anything cotton. Cheesecloth would be too delicate.

Plum pudding is usually the same as Christmas pudding these days, though I'm not sure that's true back in history.

At school, we had a pudding called Dead Man's Leg, which was suet roly poly with red jam in it. We enjoyed the gruesomeness of it,

Jo :)

[Chez]

Mmmmm this is my favourite time of the year with the luscious plum pudding and custard to follow the turkey on Christmas Day. There is a wonderful bakery near here that makes such a delicious plum pud that I don't ever have to try and make it. I remember my grandma made her pudding a month or so before Christmas (like the traditional Christmas fruit cake) and it had to hang in the pantry till the big day. There was also something you had to do to it every couple of days, but that is a secret lost in time too. Still I particularly remember as a child when they "fired" the pudding with brandy and the blue flames swallowing the pud and then being blown out by grandpa as he could never wait to eat it. If you ever do have plum pudding you have to remember to put a coin in before cooking and then some lucky person gets to wish if they find the coin in their piece of pud. Gosh ... three more days to pudding, yum.

[Chez]

Oooh totally forgot .. the usual pudding cloth is calico here in Australia or unbleached cotton.

[Crystal B.]

The potato pudding sounds pretty good. I find it interesting how different cultures have such a variety of recipes.

[Dia]

I find the idea of savory puddings intriguing. Kind of like the idea of a savory pie (or quiche) rather than a sweet one. I'm going to have to take a look at the links...

[Nathalie]

1st time I have heard of potato pudding... I usually associate pudding with chocolate...

I guess I will have to try this!

[Lily]

I once remember eating this pudding in a restaurant and I thought it was soup!!

[KeiraSoleore]

Ooh, my stomach's growling while my hips are speading just from reading about all that butter, carbs, and other goodies in copious quantities in every recipe.

RevM: I can just see my producing that stovepipe hat on the table and watching it fold over limply.

[KeiraSoleore]

A final salvo from me before the holiday...

Wenches, you've made this year a very fun one for me and filled with tons of learning. Thank you for your kind and warm welcome chez Wenches. I look forward to a great 2008 with you. Merry Christmas!!

[LorettaChase]

" I imagine those rugged mountains were better for pasture (and butter) then for olive trees." Good point, Mary Jo! The terrain would certainly influence the cuisine. Why didn't I think of that?__ Jo, I had to look up Jam Roly Poly in Lobscouse & Spotted Dog--sounds delicious, and a gruesome name would make it even more appealing, esp. to kids. One of the other puddings listed is Drowned Baby.__
Chez, I'm guessing that some kind of alcohol treatment--as for fruitcakes--was part of the secret. *g*__Crystal B, I'm thinking of writing to America's Test Kitchen--maybe they'll do a demo.__Dia, quiche is a very good analogy. I'd guess that most countries have some version of a savory pie.__Nathalie, the research has definitely expanded my view of pudding.__Lily, are you referring to the potato pudding? I'm guessing consistency would vary.__Keira, your limp pudding would then be providing not only sustenance but entertainment--and Merry Christmas to you!

[ivka]

Hi Loretta, I loved reading your food posts and one of your recipes was and still is my favorite. It is Byrek/ Burek - as we call it in Croatia. I loved one with cheese and sour cherries served with glass of buttermilk. I still make it here.
And I don't put cinnamon in baklava either.

[LorettaChase]

Ivka, that combination is very new to me but it sounds delicious!

[Ivka]

I can't find sour cherries allways so I use cherry pie filling instead.

After posting my first comment got me checking my fridge to see what I have to make Byrek/Burek, had everything to make one with cheese!Yummy!