Home › A Calendar of Dinners › Apricot Pudding
Apricot Pudding
Put 1 pint milk into saucepan, add two tablespoons Crisco, and bring to boiling point. Mix 1/2 cup cornstarch with 1/2 cup milk and stir slowly into boiling milk, add 1/2 teaspoon salt. Heat 1 cup apricot jam, and strain off juice. Stir the pieces of apricot into cornstarch and cook for 5 minutes. Sprinkle 1 tablespoon chopped pistachio nuts into wet mold and pour in hot mixture. Turn out when cold and surround with apricot juice.
This is a cornstarch blancmange, moulded and unmoulded, with jam standing in for fresh fruit. The whole thing hinges on cooking the starch long enough and stirring it without pause.
- CriscoThe book was written to sell it; Crisco was a new hydrogenated vegetable shortening at the time. Two tablespoons of butter does the same job here and tastes better, since the fat is only there for richness and gloss.
- Starch ratioHalf a cup of cornstarch to a pint and a half-cup of milk is a very stiff set, deliberately so: this pudding has to stand up on a plate. If you want a spoonable pudding rather than a moulded one, cut the starch to about 5 tablespoons and serve it in glasses.
- Constant stirringAdd the slaked starch in a thin stream while whisking, and keep whisking through the five minutes of cooking. Cornstarch scorches on the pan bottom in seconds and the lumps will not whisk out later.
- Cook it outThe five minutes is not padding. Undercooked cornstarch tastes chalky and weeps liquid in the mould; the mixture should be thick, glossy and no longer smell raw.
- "Wet mold"Rinse a 1-quart mould with cold water and pour out the excess without drying it. The film of water is what lets the pudding release. A metal mould turns out more cleanly than ceramic.
- Straining the jamWarming the jam loosens the syrup so it pours off; what stays behind is the fruit. Use a jam with real pieces in it, or the recipe has nothing to fold in and nothing to pour around.
- Chilling"Turn out when cold" is the only instruction given; in practice that means thoroughly chilled, and several hours in the refrigerator will do it. Turned out warm it will slump.
- YieldServes four to six. The reserved apricot syrup is thin; if it looks watery, reduce it briefly in the pan and cool before spooning it around the base.
Cornstarch puddings like this one were the workhorse dessert of American home cooking from the later nineteenth century onward, cheap, eggless and endlessly variable by whatever flavouring the pantry held rosewater, chocolate, coconut, or here a jar of apricot jam. They descend from blancmange, which in earlier English cookery was thickened with isinglass or ground almonds; commercial cornstarch, sold in boxes from the mid-nineteenth century, made the same shape achievable in half an hour. This particular version comes from a cookbook written as promotional literature for Crisco, the hydrogenated shortening Procter & Gamble introduced in 1911, which is why vegetable fat appears where an earlier cook would have used butter or nothing at all. The pistachios scattered in the mould give a plain white pudding a decorated top once it is inverted.