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Kiss Pudding
Boil one quart sweet milk in custard-kettle, stir into it four heaping table-spoons sugar and four table-spoons corn starch, dissolved in a little cold water or milk, and added to the well-beaten and strained yolks of four eggs. Have the whites of eggs beaten to a stiff froth with tea-cup pulverized sugar and one tea-spoon essence of vanilla, spread on top of pudding, set in a quick oven, and brown; take out, sprinkle with grated cocoa-nut, set dish away in a cool place; serve cold after three or four hours. The sweet liquor which settles to the bottom in cooling, serves as a sauce. - Mrs. W E. Baxter.
A cornstarch-thickened boiled custard under a baked meringue — straightforward once the archaic vessels and sugar terms are translated.
- Custard-kettleThis is a double boiler, not a special pot. Set a bowl or upper pan over simmering water; the milk-and-starch mixture scorches easily over direct heat.
- The hinge: temper the yolksThe instructions read ambiguously, but the sequence that works is to whisk the dissolved cornstarch into the strained yolks, then ladle some of the hot milk into that mixture before returning it all to the kettle. Adding cold yolks straight to a quart of boiling milk gives you sweet scrambled egg.
- Cook the starch outOnce thickened, keep it over the water another two or three minutes and stir constantly. Cornstarch needs that time to lose its raw, chalky taste, and the extra heat also deactivates the enzyme in yolks that would otherwise thin the pudding as it sits.
- MeasuresA quart of milk is 4 cups. The tea-cup of sugar is uncertain: period tea-cups are variously reckoned anywhere from about 1/2 to 1 cup, so treat the meringue sugar as somewhere in the region of 4 to 7 oz for four whites — in any case a sweet, firm meringue.
- Pulverized sugarNineteenth-century pulverized sugar is closer to today's superfine (caster) sugar than to confectioners' sugar, which contains added starch. Superfine dissolves into the whites without grittiness.
- A quick ovenRoughly 400 to 450F by the usual modern equivalents. At that heat the meringue colors in only a few minutes; watch it, since the peaks catch quickly.
- Cocoa-nutFreshly grated coconut in 1877. Unsweetened desiccated or frozen grated coconut is the closest substitute; sweetened flake will push an already sweet dish over.
- The "sauce"The sweet liquor is presumably syneresis as the pudding cools, whether weeping from the meringue or liquid released by the custard itself. The recipe treats it as a feature, so beat the whites to stiff peaks and let the pudding sit its full three or four hours cold before serving.
- YieldAbout six servings from a quart of milk. Serve it in the dish it baked in; the meringue will not survive being portioned neatly.
"Kisses" were small baked meringue drops, appearing in American cookbooks from the late 1820s and 1830s onward, and the name here most likely refers to the meringue lid rather than to anything in the flavoring. Buckeye Cookery and Practical Housekeeping (1877), compiled from contributions by Ohio housewives and printed at Marysville, is full of such attributed recipes — Mrs. W. E. Baxter's among them. Commercially refined cornstarch had been made in the United States since the 1840s and was marketed as a cheap, reliable substitute for arrowroot. The grated coconut is the luxury note.