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Corn-Starch Pudding
One pint sweet milk, whites of three eggs, two table-spoons cornstarch, three of sugar, and a little salt. Put the milk in a pan or small bucket, set in a kettle of hot water on the stove, and when it reaches the boiling point add the sugar, then the starch dissolved in a little cold milk, and lastly the whites of eggs whipped to a stiff froth; beat it, and let cook a few minutes, then pour into teacups, filling about half full, and set in cool place. For sauce, make a boiled custard as follows: Bring to boiling point one pint of milk, add three table-spoons sugar, then the beaten yolks thinned by adding one table-spoon milk, stirring all the time till it thickens; flavor with two tea-spoons lemon or two of vanilla, and set to cool. In serving, put one of the molds in a sauce-dish for each person, and pour over it some of the boiled custard. Or the pudding may be made in one large mold.
To make a chocolate pudding, flavor the above pudding with vanilla, remove two-thirds of it, and add half a cake of chocolate softened, mashed, and dissolved in a little milk. Put a layer of half the white pudding into the mold, then the chocolate, then the rest of the white; or two layers of chocolate may be used with a white between; or the center may be cocoa (made by adding half a cocoa-nut grated fine), and the outside chocolate; or pine-apple chopped fine (if first cooked in a little water, the latter makes a nice dressing), or strawberries may be used. -Mrs. D. Buxton.
A cornstarch blancmange with a stirred custard sauce, built to use the whites and yolks of the same three eggs. It works exactly as written; the notes below mostly concern vessels, quantities and one archaic ingredient.
- The hinge: slurry the starch coldTwo tablespoons of cornstarch dropped into hot milk will seize into lumps. Dissolve it in a few tablespoons of cold milk first, as directed, and add it in a thin stream while stirring.
- "A pan set in a kettle of hot water"This is a double boiler. Use a heatproof bowl or saucepan over simmering water; the gentle heat is what keeps the egg whites from curdling into threads.
- Cook the starch out"A few minutes" means at least three or four after the mixture thickens. Undercooked cornstarch tastes chalky, and the pudding will not set firmly enough to unmold.
- The custard sauce temperatureYolk-thickened custard sets around 175-180F and scrambles above about 185F. Keep it below a simmer and pull it when it coats the back of a spoon; strain if any lumps appear.
- "Half a cake of chocolate"Nineteenth-century chocolate came in unsweetened cakes of varying size, so this is genuinely ambiguous. Two ounces of unsweetened baking chocolate, melted with a little milk, suits this quantity of pudding; taste and add sugar, since the base is only lightly sweetened.
- Cocoa-nut is coconut"Half a cocoa-nut grated fine" means fresh coconut meat, roughly a cup and a half grated. Unsweetened desiccated coconut, soaked briefly in warm milk, is the nearest substitute.
- Molds and unmoldingTeacups hold about six ounces; filled half full they give small domes. Rinse them with cold water before filling so the pudding releases, and chill at least three hours.
- YieldOne pint of milk makes about six teacup molds filled half full, or one mold of roughly two to two and a half cups, with about a pint of custard sauce to pour over.
This is blancmange in its American cornstarch form. The older European dish was thickened with ground almonds or isinglass, and by the mid-nineteenth century with arrowroot or Irish moss; cornstarch, commercially manufactured in the United States from the 1840s onward, made the pudding cheap and reliable enough for everyday tables. Buckeye Cookery (1877), compiled from Ohio housewives' contributions, is full of such economies, and this recipe shows one clearly: the whites go into the pudding, the yolks into the sauce, and nothing is wasted. The chain of variations at the end - chocolate, coconut, pineapple, strawberry, layered in whatever order the cook likes - is typical of the book's habit of packing half a dozen desserts into a single entry.