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Chocolate Jelly
2 squares chocolate 1 tablespoonful Crisco 2 cupfuls boiling water 3/4 cupful sugar 4 tablespoonfuls cornstarch 1/4 teaspoonful salt 1 teaspoonful vanilla extract 1/2 cupful chopped walnut meats Whipped cream Break chocolate into small pieces, dissolve in boiling water, add Crisco, salt, cornstarch mixed with sugar, stir and boil for eight minutes. Remove from fire add vanilla and nuts and pour at once into wet mold. Cool, turn out and serve with whipped cream.
A cornstarch-set chocolate mold rather than a gelatin jelly, and firm enough to unmold and slice. Nothing here is difficult, but the starch has to be handled with some attention.
- "2 squares chocolate"Baking chocolate was sold in scored bars of one-ounce squares, so this is 2 oz unsweetened chocolate. Do not substitute semisweet or chips: the sugar is already accounted for in the 3/4 cup, and a sweetened bar will make the pudding cloying and softer.
- CriscoPlain vegetable shortening, 1 tablespoon. This book was issued to promote it. Unsalted butter can be substituted and tastes better; the small amount of fat appears to be there mainly for richness and mouthfeel.
- The hinge: mix starch with the sugarThe instruction to combine the cornstarch with the sugar before it goes into the hot liquid is what keeps it from lumping. Dry sugar separates the starch grains so they hydrate individually. Ignore it and you will be straining the pudding.
- Eight minutes of boilingLong by modern standards, and it will catch if left alone. Stir constantly over moderate heat, scraping the corners of the pan, keeping it at a gentle boil as the recipe directs. Cornstarch has to reach boiling to gelatinize, and a thick paste heats through slowly, which is part of why the time is generous.
- Proportion, and how firm it will beFour tablespoons of cornstarch to 2 cups liquid is more than a spoonable pudding calls for. Expect something sliceable. If you would rather spoon it from cups, use 2 to 3 tablespoons and skip the unmolding.
- "Wet mold"Rinse a 1-quart mold or bowl in cold water and pour it in without drying. The film of water is what releases the set pudding. Pour immediately, as the recipe says, since it begins skinning over off the heat.
- Cooling"Cool" here would have meant a cool larder or icebox. Cover the surface with plastic against the pudding to prevent a skin, and refrigerate 3 to 4 hours until fully set. Dip the mold briefly in warm water to turn out.
- YieldServes 4 to 6. The whipped cream is not optional in practice; the pudding is dense and the cream cuts it.
A Calendar of Dinners was one of the cookbooks Procter & Gamble published after Crisco went on sale in 1911, which is why a tablespoon of shortening turns up in a chocolate pudding where it does very little work. The word "jelly" here reflects older usage, and loosely: desserts stiff enough to hold the shape of a mold, whether set with isinglass, calf's foot, arrowroot or cornstarch, were more usually called blancmange when the setting agent was starch, so the title is best read as loose rather than as evidence of a general rule. Cornstarch molds of this kind were a staple of American home dessert-making, cheap and eggless, cornstarch having been commercially available and used in puddings from the 1840s and 1850s. The chopped walnuts stirred in at the end are typical of the period's fondness for giving a smooth pudding something to chew on.