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Chocolate Pudding
Take one and one half pints of milk, one cupful of white sugar, three tablespoonfuls of corn starch, three eggs, and three squares of Baker's chocolate. Boil the milk in a farina kettle, or in a tin pail placed in a kettle of boiling water, grate the chocolate fine and add it to the sugar. Beat the corn starch smoothly, with a little cold milk, and turn into the boiling milk. Add the beaten yolks to the mixture over the fire, stir rapidly for a few minutes, then strain it into a pudding dish. Beat the whites light with about three tablespoons of sugar, and spread over the top, and bake until brown. Serve with whipped cream.
A cornstarch-thickened chocolate custard with a baked meringue lid — straightforward, but two of the vessels and one of the ingredients need translating.
- The hinge: cook the starch outOnce the slaked cornstarch goes in, the milk must return to a full simmer and be stirred for two to three minutes. Starch that is only heated tastes chalky and will thin again as it cools.
- Farina kettleA double boiler. The tin pail in a kettle of boiling water is the same idea, and any heatproof bowl over simmering water works. Direct heat scorches chocolate and milk very quickly.
- MeasuresOne and a half pints is 3 cups of milk; a cupful is 8 fl oz. Three tablespoons of cornstarch is about 1 oz, which gives a soft spoonable set rather than a sliceable one.
- Baker's chocolateThe squares of the period were unsweetened chocolate, one ounce each, so use 3 oz. Check the weight marked on a modern bar, as square sizes have changed. Do not substitute semisweet without cutting the sugar; chopping fine will do in place of grating.
- Adding the yolksBeat the yolks, then whisk a ladleful of the hot mixture into them before returning everything to the pan. Adding cold yolks straight to boiling milk risks curdling, which may be why the recipe calls for straining.
- Baking the meringueNo temperature is given; the recipe says only to bake until brown. Around 350F for 12 to 15 minutes browns the peaks without weeping. Three whites with 3 tablespoons of sugar is a soft meringue; beat to firm, glossy peaks and seal it to the edges of the dish.
- Yield and servingFills a 1.5-quart dish and serves about six. Best slightly warm or at room temperature; refrigeration firms the starch and dulls the chocolate.
Cornstarch puddings like this one belong to the second half of the nineteenth century, when commercially milled corn starch became a cheap pantry staple in American kitchens and gave cooks a thickener that behaved more predictably than flour and used fewer eggs than a true custard. The named brand is the tell: Walter Baker & Co. of Dorchester, Massachusetts, whose chocolate works trace back to a mill established in 1765, was familiar enough that recipe writers could simply specify "squares of Baker's" — though the firm also sold sweetened lines, German's Sweet Chocolate among them, so the phrase would not have meant plain unsweetened one-ounce blocks to every reader. The construction — poured into its serving dish, capped with the leftover whites beaten with sugar and browned in the oven — is the same economical logic behind lemon meringue pie and queen of puddings: nothing is wasted, and the dish arrives at the table looking like more work than it was.