The Truth is out There

A steak and kidney pudding is a pound of beef and half a pound of ox kidney sealed inside a crust made of the fat from around the kidney, steamed in a basin under a cloth for five hours, and when the cloth comes off and the knife goes in, the gravy that has made itself inside runs out across the plate and the whole table leans in. The crust is suet: the hard white fat that sits round a beef kidney, grated into flour with cold water and nothing else, and it is the fat doing the work. In the steam it does not crisp like a pie lid. It goes soft, dense and slippery, soaked with gravy on the inside and like a dumpling on the out, and a wedge of it on the fork with the meat is the dish. Inside, the shin was cut into cubes and tossed in seasoned flour, the kidney into pieces the size of a thumbnail, both raw, packed in with an onion and a splash of water, and the lid pinched over. No stock, no wine, no granules. Five hours of the cheapest, hardest-working cut on the animal cooking in its own blood and juice with the kidney giving it depth, until it cuts with a spoon. Mrs Beeton printed it in 1861 and put oysters in with the kidney, because oysters were a penny a dozen and a poor man's meat. The French called the English Les Rosbifs, and the English called it John Bull's pudding. Every pub and chop house in the country had the basins in the copper at eleven, lifted out with a hook, turned onto the plate with a wobble, and the first cut sending the steam to the ceiling. In the mill towns it was Saturday dinner. On the Clyde it was Kate and Sidney. Soldiers in two wars wrote home asking for it. Every part of it is the animal: the fat in the crust, the shin, the kidney, the gravy made from nothing but themselves. The vegetables arrived in a separate dish and nobody fought over them. The one in the plastic tub, microwaved for four minutes, is lean diced beef, vegetable suet and a starch sauce, and it tastes of the tub. The real one still exists in a few pubs, with the cloth, and when it comes to the table men of seventy go quiet.