Dock pudding?

[Burt]

Has anyone ever heard of this?

The recipe taken from a book is as follows;

pick dock leaves and an equal amount of nettles, boil the nettles and dock leaves then add salt and pepper and a little oatmeal pour into a frying pan with some bacon
(it does add at this point it may look like something else you may found in the fields)
Supposed to taste delicious?

Does anyone know, before i try in the spring, what this or just nettles on their own taste like?

 

[wolf]

bitter....

 

[tomtom]

i can imagen doing it with the nettles and bacon but i cant say the dock appeals i have tasted them before

 

[scanker]

There's a recipe for dock pudding in A Cook on the Wild Side - is that the one you've found?

 

[Jumbalaya]

I generally find docks are pretty revolting... bitter. Red veined dock very much so. If you can identify young leaves of the broad-leaved dock - up to about 2 inches long - you may stand a better chance as I have found they haven't developed the bitterness of the grown up plant. There are some very old recipes for using the yellow dock, but I have been having trouble identifying exactly which plant this is. Old plant names and localised names often conflict with modern terminology which is rather a drag.

Thinking of it, I wonder if your recipe was referring to pacience dock... which could be the REAL patience dock or BISTORT [Polygonum bistorta] which was also once called Pacience.

Marcus

 

[locum76]

dock leaves and roots are too manky to contemplate eating (i have tried). nettles are fine to eat but dont really have that much flavour.

 

[Burt]

The book I got the recipe from is called The Dalesman Book Of Country Recipes; ISBN 0 85206 757 7

It was published in 1983, and has loads of weird and wonderful recipes and some of the more common ones still used.

I'll give it a go any way and let you all know whether I kept it down!

 

[JohnB]

These are held every year in Mytholmroyd, West Yorks.

Have a look here:

http://www.calderdale-online.org/html/community/life5.html

 

[Tony]

These are held every year in Mytholmroyd, West Yorks.

Have a look here:

http://www.calderdale-online.org/html/community/life5.html

Cool link

 

[ilovemybed]

Good link - also answered the question:
"The dock leaves used are from Polygonum Bistorta,"

 

[match]

Ah, polygonum bistorta isn't Dock at all, its more comonly known as 'bistort' - which is a tasty green vegetable.

dock puddings are often referred to, but they don't usually mean 'Dock' - Rumex ssp. - dock is a much older word that means 'big flat-leafed greens' which has stuck to a particular big flat-leafed green in common parlance (I'll refer to the former use as 'dock' and the common plant as 'Dock' )

Either way - dock puddings are quite common foods in spring and around easter - they were often designed to be a bit bitter, and are almost all made using eggs - kind of like a cross between an omelette and souffle.

A common one is for tansy pudding - very bitter, traditionally served at easter, and acts as a general 'fresh veg/liver kick-start/de-wormer' after a long winter living on meat and scraps. This recipe for the one I've made before is from 'The Practice of Cookery' from 1840:

Pour a quart of boiling milk over a thick slice of the crumb of bread; cover it till cold. Beat the yolks of six, and the white of two eggs. Pound some tansy with two or three leaves of spinach; squeeze the juice, and put in as much of it as will make the pudding of a good green colour, a glass of brandy, half a grated nutmeg, and four ounces of fresh butter; mix all the ingredients, sweeten and put it into a sauce-pan, and stir it over the fire till it be hot. Bake it in a buttered dish for half an hour. Before serving, strew sugar over the top.

A very interesting taste, but definitely one of those 'good-for-you' spring dishes, rather than a delicious delicacy