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Corn-Flour Custard Pudding
Mix three ounces of corn-flour with one quart of sweet milk, one or two eggs well beaten, a little butter, and four table-spoonfuls of sugar. Flavour to taste, and boil for eight minutes. Pour it into a pie-dish, and brown it before the fire. This is an excellent dish.
A stovetop cornstarch custard, thickened in the pan and given colour under heat rather than baked. It comes together in under fifteen minutes, and the only real risk is scorching.
- Corn-flour is cornstarchIn British usage corn-flour means the fine white starch sold in the United States as cornstarch, not cornmeal and not finely milled maize flour. Three ounces is roughly two-thirds of a cup.
- Imperial quartCassell's was published in London, so the quart is 40 fl oz — five US cups of milk, not four. Using four cups will give a noticeably stiffer pudding, which some cooks may prefer.
- Slake the starch firstThe instruction to "mix" the corn-flour with the milk means slurry it with a little cold milk before the rest goes in. Starch dropped into warm milk lumps instantly and no amount of beating recovers it fully.
- Eight minutes is for the starch, not the eggsCornstarch reaches full thickness within a minute or two of the boil and needs only a short further cook to lose its raw taste. Eight minutes of boiling with whole eggs in the pan risks curdling; temper the beaten eggs with a ladle of the hot thickened milk, return them off the heat, and give it no more than a minute back on low.
- Constant stirring, heavy panMilk-and-starch mixtures catch on the base long before the surface shows it. A heavy saucepan and a flat-ended wooden spatula that reaches the corners are worth more here than any amount of attention to the clock.
- "Brown it before the fire"Browning in front of an open hearth, the surface facing the heat rather than the pudding being baked; the modern equivalent is the broiler, three or four inches from the element for two to three minutes until the surface freckles. Dot the top with a little extra butter and sugar first if you want a proper glaze.
- FlavouringThe recipe leaves this open. Nutmeg, grated lemon zest, or a bay leaf and a strip of lemon peel infused in the milk and strained out are all in keeping with milk puddings of the period. Vanilla extract works, added off the heat so it does not cook away.
- YieldAbout six servings in a shallow pie-dish. It sets firmer as it cools, and is best eaten warm, since chilled cornstarch can go pasty.
Cornstarch reached British and American kitchens in quantity in the middle of the nineteenth century, and cookbooks of the following decades are thick with puddings built on it. The appeal was economy: a quart of milk and a few pennyworth of starch stretched one or two eggs into a dish that would otherwise have needed considerably more, and it set reliably without the water bath and slow oven a true baked custard demands. The recipe is essentially a demonstration piece — the reader who masters a starch-thickened milk can go on to blancmanges, moulded shapes and the whole family of cold sweets that filled Victorian supper tables.