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Corn-Flour Cream
To two ounces of corn-flour add one pint of milk, two ounces of pounded sugar, and a few drops of vanilla. Stir the whole over the fire for ten minutes, and pour it into custard-cups; strew ratafias over the surface, and serve hot.
A plain cornstarch blancmange served warm rather than turned out cold, from a book that treats it as a lesson in thickening with starch. The whole thing rests on getting the starch slaked and then properly cooked out.
- Corn-flour is cornstarchBritish corn-flour is the fine white starch sold in the US as cornstarch, not the ground maize meal Americans call corn flour. Substituting cornmeal gives a coarse porridge, not a cream.
- The pint is imperialCassell's pint is 20 fl oz, so about 2 1/2 US cups. Two ounces of starch to that volume is roughly 1/2 cup by measure and produces a very firm, spoonable cream; drop to 1 1/2 oz if you want a pouring consistency.
- Slake the starch firstMix the corn-flour to a smooth paste with a few tablespoons of the cold milk before it meets the hot, or you will chase lumps for the rest of the ten minutes. Heat the remaining milk with the sugar, pour it onto the paste, then return everything to the pan.
- Ten minutes means cooked outThe mixture thickens within a minute or two of the boil, but the timing is there to drive off the raw, chalky taste of the starch. Keep it at a bare simmer and stir constantly across the base of the pan, where it catches.
- Pounded sugarLoaf sugar crushed fine, so ordinary caster or granulated sugar is the equivalent. Two ounces is about 1/4 cup, which reads as lightly sweet by modern standards.
- RatafiasSmall, dry almond macaroons, roughly the size of a hazelnut, sold in some British shops and Italian delis as amaretti secchi. Crumbled amaretti or crushed almond biscotti stand in; add them at the table, since they soften within a few minutes on the hot surface.
- VanillaA few drops of extract is the literal reading, but the period alternative is better: infuse a split vanilla pod in the milk while it heats and strain it out before thickening.
- YieldFour small custard-cups, or three generous ones. It sets hard as it cools, so pour it out and serve it while it is still hot.
Corn-flour reached British kitchens in the middle of the nineteenth century as an industrial product, and cookery writers of the period were still explaining what to do with it, since it is a demonstration of starch thickening as much as a dish. Refined maize starch was cheap, kept indefinitely in a dry cupboard, and thickened milk without the eggs a true custard demanded, which made it a staple of nursery and invalid cookery and gave rise to the whole family of moulded blancmanges. The ratafias scattered over the top are the older element by far: almond-flavoured biscuits generally said to take their name from the almond-flavoured cordial, and a standard garnish for creams and trifles since the eighteenth century. Serving the cream hot in cups, rather than chilled and turned out of a mould, is the simpler treatment.