Home › The Principles of Cookery › CORN-FLOUR (for Children)
CORN-FLOUR (for Children)
To two tea-spoonfuls of corn-flour, mixed with two table-spoonfuls of cold water, add half a pint of boiling milk; boil for eight minutes, and sweeten slightly. It should be, when warm, about the thickness of cream. For children of a year old and upwards, it may be prepared wholly with milk, and thicker. For infants, diet it is important that good sweet milk should be used.
A nursery gruel of the plainest kind: starch, milk, a little sugar. The only technical points are the measure of the milk and the whisking.
- Corn-flour is cornstarchBritish "corn-flour" is pure maize starch, sold in the United States as cornstarch. It is not cornmeal or masa, and substituting either will give you a gritty porridge rather than a smooth cream.
- Half a pintCassell's used the imperial pint of 20 fl oz, so half a pint is 10 fl oz, about 1 1/4 US cups. Two teaspoons of starch to that much milk gives a pourable sauce; for the "thicker" version mentioned at the end, work up to about a tablespoon.
- The slurry is the hingeThe two tablespoons of cold water exist only to disperse the starch. Mix it smooth before the hot milk goes anywhere near it, then pour the milk in slowly while whisking, or you will get lumps that no amount of boiling will break down.
- Eight minutes is long but not wrongCornstarch thickens fully within a minute or two of boiling. The extra time cooks out the raw, chalky taste of the starch, which is noticeable in a dish this plain. Keep the heat low and stir constantly once it thickens, since it catches easily.
- Sweeten slightlyNo quantity is given; a teaspoon of sugar per half pint is in keeping with the intent. Add it at the end, off the heat.
- It sets as it cools"About the thickness of cream" applies while warm. Chilled, the same mixture thickens noticeably further, though at this proportion it stays nearer a thick pouring custard than a mould, which is worth knowing if you are judging consistency out of the pan.
- Not infant foodThe final sentence advises using it for infants. Current guidance is that unmodified cow's milk should not be given as a drink or feed before twelve months, and a starch gruel supplies almost no iron, fat quality or protein an infant needs. Treat this as a light milk pudding for older children and convalescents only.
- YieldOne or two small servings, roughly a cup and a quarter.
Cornstarch reached British kitchens in the middle of the nineteenth century as a manufactured product: refined maize starch, sold in packets under brand names, with Brown & Polson of Paisley generally credited with popularising "patent corn flour" in the 1850s. Its appeal was precisely its blandness and reliability, which made it the standard thickener of what Victorian cookery books called invalid and nursery cookery — the small dishes prepared for the sick, the very young and the toothless, where digestibility mattered more than flavour. What follows is less a recipe than a ratio, given so that a nurse or a young mistress could scale it up, thin it down, or thicken it into a mould as the patient required. The instruction that "good sweet milk should be used" carries more weight than it appears to, in a period before pasteurisation, when milk of doubtful freshness was a routine hazard of town life.