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Arrowroot Pudding
Mix two dessert-spoonfuls of arrowroot with half a cupful of milk. Place a pint and a half of milk in a saucepan with the grated rind of half a lemon and a table-spoonful of sugar. Boil it, and pour it upon the arrowroot. Stir it well, and when cool, add three well-beaten eggs and a piece of butter the size of a walnut. Line the edges of a well-buttered pie-dish with puff paste, spread a layer of preserved fruit at the bottom, then pour in the mixture, and bake in a good oven. Time to bake, half an hour. Sufficient for five or six persons. Probable cost, 1s.
A baked lemon custard thickened with arrowroot, set over jam in a pastry-edged dish. It behaves like a custard, not a starch pudding, so the temperature at which the eggs go in decides whether it succeeds.
- Cool the arrowroot base before the eggs"When cool" is the hinge. The scalded milk poured onto the arrowroot will be near boiling and will scramble beaten eggs on contact. Let it drop to lukewarm — hand-warm, no hotter — then beat the eggs in.
- Imperial measuresA pint and a half in this book is imperial: 30 fl oz, or about 3 3/4 US cups. A dessert-spoon is roughly two teaspoons, so the arrowroot amounts to about four teaspoons — a light thickening only, since the eggs do most of the setting.
- Butter the size of a walnutTake this as about 1/2 oz, 15 g, a generous tablespoon. Stir it in while the milk is still warm enough to melt it.
- A good ovenThere is no fixed modern equivalent; somewhere around 375-400F (190-200C) is a reasonable reading, hot enough to set the puff paste edging. If the custard begins to dome or bubble at the edge, drop to 350F.
- Baking timeThe stated half hour may prove short for this quantity of custard in a modern oven, so be prepared to go longer. It is done when the centre still trembles slightly and a knife inserted an inch from the middle comes out clean. Baked until firm all through, it will weep.
- Preserved fruitAny thick jam or bottled fruit, well drained. A wet layer will bleed up through the custard, so use a stiff preserve and spread it thin.
- Puff paste on the edges onlyThe pastry is a decorative rim, not a lining — a band pressed round the buttered rim of the dish. Chill it before it goes into the oven or it will slump into the custard.
- Grated lemon rindGrate only the yellow zest. Steeping it in the milk as it heats, then straining before the eggs go in, gives a cleaner flavour than leaving the rind in suspension.
- Yield and costFive or six as written. The "probable cost, 1s." is a Victorian household budgeting note, not a modern guide.
Arrowroot — the starch washed from the rhizomes of Maranta arundinacea, imported largely from St Vincent and the wider Caribbean — was a staple of the nineteenth-century English store cupboard, prized less for flavour than for its reputation as a light, easily digested food for invalids and children. The pudding demonstrates the standard method: a starch slaked cold, scalded with hot milk, then enriched with eggs so that the dish sets by coagulation as well as gelatinisation. The name is often traced to an Arawak word for flour-root, with the story that the plant drew poison from arrow wounds attached later; that etymology is traditional rather than settled. The puff-paste rim and the layer of preserve turn what was fundamentally sickroom food into something fit for the family table.