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Eggless Corn Starch Pudding
One quart milk, three tablespoonfuls corn starch, a little salt; put the milk in a farina kettle. When it boils, stir the corn starch, (previously mixed in a little cold milk) in it, which must be reserved from the quart of milk for this purpose with a boiled custard or whipped cream.
A plain blancmange-style pudding from the era when eggs were seasonal and expensive. The text is compressed to the point of being garbled at the end, so a little reading between the lines is needed.
- Farina kettleThis is a double boiler — an inner pan set over water in an outer one. Milk thickened with starch scorches easily over direct heat, so use a heatproof bowl or saucepan over simmering water if you have no double boiler.
- The garbled last clauseThe sentence collapses: the reserved cold milk is for slaking the starch, and the boiled custard or whipped cream is a sauce served with the finished pudding, not stirred into it. Read it as two separate instructions.
- No sugar is listedThe recipe gives milk, cornstarch and salt only. The sweetening may have been left to the accompanying custard or cream; if you are serving it plain, 3 to 4 tablespoons of sugar dissolved in the milk is in keeping.
- Starch ratioThree tablespoons to a quart is a soft set — spoonable, barely able to stand unmoulded. For a pudding firm enough to turn out of a mould you would need more starch than the recipe gives.
- Cook it outOnce the starch goes in, keep it over the water and stir for a good 8 to 10 minutes after it thickens. Cornstarch pulled off the moment it stiffens tastes chalky and raw.
- FlavouringThe recipe names none. If you want one, vanilla or a strip of lemon peel steeped in the milk suits this kind of pudding. Add extract off the heat, since the flavour cooks away.
- Chilling and skinPour into a wetted mould or cups and press plastic wrap or buttered paper on the surface to stop a skin forming. It needs at least three hours cold to set.
- YieldA quart of milk gives about six servings.
Cornstarch puddings spread through American and British households in the second half of the nineteenth century, as commercially refined maize starch became cheap and widely sold — it gave cooks the smooth set of an old-fashioned blancmange without arrowroot, isinglass or calf's-foot jelly. The "eggless" in the title is the point of the recipe: egg prices varied with the season, and the austerity here is characteristic — the pudding itself is milk and starch and salt, while the richness is moved to a boiled custard or whipped cream poured over at the table.