Rather late in the day, I have discovered overnight Aga porridge. You mix your oats and water the night before, as if making normal porridge, and once it has come to the boil you give it a final stir and put it in the warming oven. And leave, overnight. In the morning you have porridge. It's as simple as that. I don't know why I thought it wouldn't be, but I think I vaguely suspected it would be lumpy, or that the top half of the pan's contents would have turned to a horrible skin. The only drawback is that by the stage of the evening when you are tired and would like to go to bed, going into the kitchen instead and making porridge takes an effort. Maybe I could start it off earlier in the day. Overnight and evening Aga porridge?
I made pease pudding the other day for the first time. We had some once with gammon as part of a pub meal somewhere in the north of England, and I resolved to try it at home. I even got as far as buying a bag of split dried green peas, which sat in the kitchen cupboard for a long time. Finally I got round to making the pudding. The internet is full of pease pudding theories, all variants on mixing boiled dried peas with butter and eggs and boiling them. I went with my ancient Good Housekeepers cookery book, except that I wimped out of boiling my pudding in a floured cloth and simply used a buttered pudding basin.
You boil the peas until they are soft. I soaked mine overnight, before reading the instruction on the packet that said No need to soak overnight. Dried peas must have got softer since the 1970s. The peas took longer to cook than the fifty minutes it said on the packet, despite the soaking and still being in date. The next step was to press the cooked peas through a sieve, at which point I discovered they weren't entirely done. Most of them went through in the end, and I felt glad I was not a thirteen year old Edwardian kitchen maid trying to do the same thing with raw mushrooms and a horse hair sieve. I mixed the pea puree with melted butter and an egg, seasoned it with pepper and a pork stock cube because I didn't have any suitable bacon bits, pressed it into the basin, and boiled it some more.
The Systems Administrator eyed up the cooked pudding suspiciously and asked 'What's that?'. I replied that it was pease pudding. The SA took the amount that one takes of something in order to be polite, and after the first mouthful announced 'I like the pudding'. I thought the pork stock cube was too dominant and made a mental note to get some bacon next time and fry a chopped rasher to flavour the pudding, not to mention substituting the rest of the bacon for the gammon steaks we had with the pudding. I bought the steaks because I was too mean to invest in an entire joint, and the packet promised the pigs had been bedded on straw in airy barns, but they exuded white stuff during cooking and tasted too much like dead pig.
I had the rest of the pudding reheated for lunch while the SA was out, along with some Nigel Slater roast cabbage. (Roasting white cabbage with olive oil, lemon and parmesan works surprisingly well, but I don't think I'd bother with the cheese sauce next time). So we have had pease pudding hot, but not yet cold or nine days old. I have put split dried green peas on the shopping list so that I can make it again. It's a very old idea, pease pudding, and I feel I am part of the English food tradition eating it.
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