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Corn Starch Pudding
One quart milk, two eggs, four tablespoons corn starch, mix the corn starch with half cup cold milk, a tablespoon sugar, a little salt and two eggs beaten very light; wet tea cups with cold water, and fill the cups half full; when cold pour them out and serve with whipped cream. Sweeten with vanilla to taste.
A plain cornstarch blancmange, written in the shorthand of a period cook who assumed you knew the method. The cooking step is missing entirely, so read the points before starting.
- The missing instructionNothing here tells you to cook the pudding, but you must. Scald the remaining milk, whisk in the cornstarch slurry, and cook over moderate heat, stirring, until it thickens and the raw starch taste is gone — three to five minutes at a bare simmer. Cornstarch needs to reach near-boiling to gelatinize fully; pulled off too early it will taste chalky and never set.
- Adding the eggsTemper them: whisk a ladle of the hot thickened milk into the beaten eggs, then return the mixture to the pan and cook a minute or two more without letting it boil hard, or the eggs will curdle into threads. Strain into the cups as insurance.
- SugarOne tablespoon to a quart of milk is barely sweet by modern taste, and the closing line — "sweeten with vanilla to taste" — suggests the writer expected you to adjust. Figure 1/3 to 1/2 cup sugar for a dessert pudding, added to the milk as it heats.
- VanillaVanilla does not sweeten; it flavors. Use a teaspoon or so of extract stirred in off the heat, after cooking, since the aroma is volatile.
- Teacups as moldsTeacups of the period varied, but reckoning on something like 6 ounces, a quart of milk half-fills roughly ten of them. Wetting the cups with cold water rather than greasing them is the correct trick — the film of water lets the set pudding slip out clean. Ramekins or small custard cups work the same way.
- Cooling and unmolding"When cold" means fully chilled and firm, two to three hours in the refrigerator. Loosen the edge with a fingertip or thin knife and invert onto the plate; a brief dip of the cup base in warm water helps a stubborn one.
- YieldAbout ten small molded puddings. Serve with lightly whipped, barely sweetened cream, as directed — the pudding itself is deliberately mild.
Cornstarch puddings of this kind are the thrifty American descendants of blancmange, the medieval and early modern European dish of milk set with almonds, rice flour, or later isinglass and gelatin. Cornstarch, refined from maize and sold in boxes from the middle of the nineteenth century — the Oswego, New York works of Kingsford is the name most often cited — let any household set a milk pudding without an expensive gelatin or a long-boiled calf's foot, and recipes like this one multiplied in cheap domestic cookbooks. The molding in teacups is the whole point of the dish: an inverted, glossy, faintly quivering white shape looked like a company dessert while costing little more than a quart of milk and two eggs.