MacBook Pro Mid 2009 has a recovery partition?
The answer to your first question is no, unfortunately mid 2009 mbp's didn't have the recovery partition built in.

In regards to your dvd boot issue, you'll probably need to provide quite a bit more info for a definitive solution, but I can offer a few suggestions anyway. First off, try holding the option key when booting to see all your available discs, hopefully you'll see the inserted DVD and the problem will be solved.

If you still have no luck, try booting into verbose mode (command + v at startup) and seeing if theres any obvious system hangs. Verbose mode just basically shows you whats going on behind the scenes when you're starting up.

If you can provide a bit more info, like why you're reinstalling and if theres an OS currently loaded on the drive, hopefully we can zero in on an answer.