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Corn Starch Fruit Pudding
One quart of milk, four tablespoonfuls of corn starch, one tablespoonful of sugar, one egg, and a pinch of salt. Boil the milk in a farina kettle, reserving enough to moisten the corn starch.-- When it thickens, wet cups in cold water, drain them, then lay in the bottom of each cup two halves of canned peaches or a slice or two of orange, fill the cups with the pudding and when cold turn them out upon saucers. The syrup from the peaches is nice put in a rich pudding sauce, for this; or it is very nice eaten with cream and sugar.
A blancmange-style cornstarch mold, set in cups over fruit and turned out. The method is sound; only the vessel names and the sweetness level need translating.
- Farina kettleThis is a double boiler — an inner pan set in an outer pan of simmering water. Milk thickened with cornstarch scorches easily over direct heat, so use a bowl or pan over water, or a heavy saucepan with constant stirring and low heat.
- QuantitiesOne quart milk to four tablespoons cornstarch gives a soft mold that will just hold its shape. If you want it to stand up cleanly on the saucer, go to five or six tablespoons; the original relies on thorough chilling to firm it.
- SweetnessOne tablespoon of sugar for a quart of milk is almost unsweetened by current taste, on the assumption that the canned peach syrup and the sauce carry the sugar. Three to four tablespoons in the pudding itself is closer to what most people expect now.
- The eggBeat it, then temper it with a ladle of the hot milk mixture before stirring it back in, and cook a couple of minutes more. Added cold and whole it will thread and scramble.
- Stirring and the hingeWhisk the cornstarch smooth in the reserved cold milk and stir continuously as it comes to the boil. Cornstarch needs to reach a full boil briefly to lose its raw starch taste and thicken fully, but once thickened, prolonged stirring or hard boiling breaks the gel and the pudding weeps.
- Wetting the cupsRinsing the cups in cold water and draining them is the unmolding trick, and it works — the film of water keeps the starch from gripping. Do not dry them.
- Chilling"When cold" means fully cold: three to four hours in the refrigerator, ideally overnight. A warm mold will slump the moment it leaves the cup.
- YieldAbout eight half-cup molds from a quart of milk, more with the fruit in the bottom. Canned peaches in syrup are still sold; drained peaches in juice work, though the syrup sauce will be thinner.
Cornstarch puddings arrived in American home cooking in the middle of the nineteenth century, when commercially milled cornstarch became cheap and widely advertised as a substitute for the arrowroot, rice flour and isinglass used in earlier blancmanges. Manufacturers printed recipes on their packages and in pamphlets, and cookbooks of the 1870s through 1900s are full of variations of this same formula: a quart of milk, a few spoons of starch, sugar, and whatever fruit was in the cupboard. That last part explains the reliance on canned peaches here — home and commercial canning had made out-of-season fruit an ordinary thing, and a dessert built on milk, starch and a can was cheap, could be made the day before, and needed no oven.