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Delmonico Pudding
A quart milk, three table-spoons corn-starch dissolved in cold milk, the yolks of five eggs beaten well, six table-spoons sugar. Boil three or four minutes, pour into a pudding-dish and bake about half an hour; beat whites of eggs with six table-spoons sugar, put over top, and return pudding to oven until it is a delicate brown.- Mrs. J. Holland, New Castle, Ind.
A cornstarch custard baked under a meringue, of the family that includes queen of puddings. The original assumes you know where the thickening stops and the baking begins.
- The hinge: temper the yolksBring the milk and cornstarch to a boil and cook three or four minutes until it visibly thickens, then take it off the heat and whisk a ladleful into the beaten yolks before returning everything to the pan. Adding yolks straight to boiling starch gives you scrambled egg in pudding.
- Quantities in modern termsA quart of milk is 4 cups; 3 tablespoons cornstarch to that much milk gives a soft, spoonable set rather than a sliceable one. The 6 tablespoons sugar in the base is modest by current standards — about 1/3 cup plus 2 teaspoons.
- The pudding-dishUse a 1.5 to 2 quart baking dish, deep enough that the meringue has a rim to grip. Whole milk matters here; skim gives a thin, chalky custard.
- Oven temperatureThe book gives none. Bake the custard at 325-350F for the half hour specified — it should be just set with a slight wobble at the centre. Above 375F the eggs curdle and the surface weeps.
- The meringueSix tablespoons sugar to five whites is a soft meringue; beat to stiff, glossy peaks and add the sugar gradually once the whites are foamy. Spread it so it touches the edge of the dish all the way round, which stops it shrinking into an island as it cools.
- "A delicate brown"Ten to fifteen minutes at 350F, or five minutes nearer 400F if you want more colour and less drying. Watch it rather than timing it.
- Yield and servingServes six to eight. Serve warm or at room temperature the day it is made — meringue over a wet custard goes beady and leaks in the refrigerator overnight.
The name is a borrowing rather than a provenance: Delmonico's in New York was the most celebrated restaurant in nineteenth-century America, and by the 1870s cooks and cookbook compilers were attaching its name to dishes with no connection to the restaurant. What Mrs. Holland of New Castle, Indiana actually contributed to Buckeye Cookery (1877) is a cornstarch-thickened boiled custard finished with a sweetened meringue, a form that ran through American and English household books under many names. Its popularity owed a good deal to commercial cornstarch, which by the 1860s was cheap, shelf-stable and, it is often said, promoted as a substitute for the arrowroot and rice flour of earlier recipes; it let a quart of milk and five eggs stretch to a dish for eight. That the whites are used up on top rather than discarded is characteristic of the book's economy.