Rag pudding (also known as Rag pie) is a savoury dish consisting of minced meat and onions wrapped in a suet pastry, which is then cooked in a cheesecloth. The dish was invented during the 19th century in Oldham, a former mill town in Lancashire, previously at the centre of England's cotton industry. Rag pudding pre-dates ceramic basins and plastic boiling bags in cookery, and so the cotton or muslin rag cloths common in Oldham were used in the dish's preparation.