[Sca-cooks] Re: rice pudding & marrow

[Philip & Susan Troy]

Craig Jones. wrote:

>>Reach out with your feelings, Drakey. Use the Source!
>>
>
> Grasshopper, can you pluck this cuskynole from my hand?


"Man who catch cuskynole with chopstick accomplish anything."
"Anything? Like what?"
"Don't know. Never try."

(How many people have seen the Real, Live Toshiro Mifune bit with the
chopsticks and the cloud of gnats?)


>>Markham has about ten assorted sausage and pud recipes, overall,
>>including a link sausage recipe which makes it pretty clear that
>>
> farmes
>
>>are cleaned intestines used as casings.
>>
>
> Ah ok, cheers.  I'm at work and don't have Markham to hand (on;y
> apicius and the domostroi, don't ask...).  That sounds like a great
> and cheap recipe for a feast if I can get the intestine.  What would
> you recommend to get the goo into the casings?  Not being a sausage
> nut...


You can go several ways, ranging from a funnel, or some variant, to an
industrial sausage stuffer, which is like an enormous hypodermic
syringe. Period cooks would probably have used a hollow, truncated cow's
horn, and there's a cool, inexpensive sausage funnel I sometimes see in
Middle Eastern markets. It's like a funnel with a half-cylinder
extension to the open edge, kind of like a large scoop with a hollow,
tubular handle. You rinse the casings inside and out by running water
through them, thread the casings onto the tube (at the risk of being
crass, this is a function fairly familiar to most 21st-century men, at
one point or another in their lives), fill the hopper and push some of
it into the tube until it just begins to come out the small end. Then
you tie off the end (this helps prevent air from being trapped in the
casing), and push the filling into the casing, which will begin to fill
and slide off the funnel end as it expands and lengthens. Filling it too
full is a Bad Thing. In some cases this could be a three-or-four-hand
job. At the very least it's a good idea to work close to the surface of
a table so the filled lengths of casing don't hang down and run the risk
of tearing.

Markham specifies in one of these recipes that you can use long lengths
of gut for link sausages, as for your typical string of sausages, but
that for puddings, you use shorter links, presumably for individual
puddings. Maybe a small length, say, no more than eighteen inches, tied
into a ring after filling (I'm assuming hog casings, but ultimately
nothing teaches like your own, real experience, and for all I know
smaller lamb casings may be more common where you are). I think
Markham's advice about the length is about the weight a filled casing
will have to support, both in maneuvering the filled, raw casing to the
pot for poaching, and for hanging up to dry a bit before reheating and
serving. Yeah, he sez to boil them, but you don't wanna listen to him in
this case; puddings just love to burst in the water, leaving you with
lumpy, weak soup. You want to lower them carefully into just barely
simmering poaching water, and heat them very gently. If they start to
float and show visible bubbles inside the casings, you can carefully
prick the bubbles with a pin.

I would definitely stick to Markham's quantities, rather than Sass's, if
you want to do these as puds.


>
>
>>Digby and Plat call them
>>tharmes, IIRC. I assume there's somebody's regional dialect involved
>>
> in
>
>>the shift. Unless false teeth are involved.
>>
>
> There speaks the man of experience?  I didn't think you were that old
> ;)


Not so old, but a lot of restaurants don't supply decent dental
insurance as a benefit... ;-)


> These sound quite funky.  I might see what I can do to get some
> casings as this sounds like a lot of fun.

Yeah, they do sound fun, and probably less intimidating than black
puddings for some people.

Adamantius
--
Phil & Susan Troy

troy at asan.com

"It was so blatant that Roger threw at him.  Clemens gets away with
things that get other people thrown out of games.  As long as they
let him get away with it, it's going  to continue." -- Joe Torre, 9/98