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Arrowroot Pudding, Plain
Mix two table-spoonfuls of arrowroot with a little water. Put into a saucepan a pint and a half of milk, with a little grated nutmeg and a table-spoonful of sugar. When it boils, pour it upon the arrowroot, stirring it well, and add a piece of butter the size of a walnut. Pour it into a well-buttered pie-dish, and bake in a moderate oven for an hour or more. This is a wholesome pudding for the nursery. Sufficient for five or six persons. Probable cost, 6d.
A nursery milk pudding of the plainest sort, thickened with arrowroot rather than rice or sago. It works, but a few of the original's assumptions need translating.
- Moderate ovenConventionally read as about 325-350F (165-175C), though the book gives no temperature. At an hour or more the pudding sets firm with a skin on top; check at 45 minutes for a lighter set.
- Slurry first, alwaysThe hinge of the recipe is mixing the arrowroot smooth with cold water before the hot milk goes in. Arrowroot dropped dry into hot milk seizes into lumps that will not disperse.
- Do not boil the arrowrootArrowroot thickens at around 160-175F and loses viscosity if held at a hard boil, which may be why the milk is poured onto the starch rather than the starch stirred into simmering milk. Combine off the heat, then get it into the dish for baking.
- MeasuresTwo tablespoons of arrowroot to a pint and a half of milk is a slack ratio by modern habit; note that the imperial pint is 20 fl oz, so this is about 30 fl oz (roughly 850 ml) of milk. Using US pints gives a noticeably looser pudding.
- Butter the size of a walnutReckoned anywhere from half an ounce to an ounce (15-30 g); half an ounce, about a tablespoon, is enough here.
- MilkWhole milk is what the book assumes. Skimmed milk makes a thin, watery pudding here, since there is no egg to carry the body.
- Sugar and nutmegOne tablespoon of sugar for six servings is barely sweet by current taste. Two or three is closer to what most people now expect, and the nutmeg is better grated over the surface before baking than boiled in the milk.
- Yield and servingFive or six small nursery portions, or four modern ones. Serve warm with stewed fruit or a spoonful of jam.
Arrowroot, the starch washed from the rhizomes of Maranta arundinacea, reached British kitchens through the West Indies and was sold by chemists as much as by grocers. Victorian household manuals valued it as an invalid and infant food: it was thought lighter and more digestible than wheat flour, and it thickens cleanly, which is why this pudding is recommended "for the nursery" rather than the dinner table. It belongs to the plain milk puddings that formed the backbone of nineteenth-century children's and sickroom cookery, alongside sago, tapioca and ground rice. The costing at sixpence is a reminder of the book's audience -- a household counting pennies per dish. It is often said that much of what is sold as arrowroot today is tapioca or potato starch; genuine Maranta arrowroot is still available and behaves as described here.