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Corn-Flour Fruit Pudding
Prepare a batter as for corn-flour blancmange, boil it until smooth, and let it get cold. Fill a dish with about two pounds of any kind of good ripe fruit; stew these till soft with sugar, and when cold place the corn-flour in the middle of a dish, and pour the fruit over and round it. Peeled and cored apples or pears may be used for the same purpose.
A cold moulded cornstarch pudding served in a pool of stewed fruit — simple, but the original assumes you already know the blancmange recipe it refers back to.
- Corn-flour is cornstarchBritish "corn-flour" means cornstarch (cornflour), not maize flour or cornmeal. Do not substitute either; you will get grit rather than a set.
- The blancmange baseA common Victorian proportion is about 2 oz (a scant 1/2 cup) cornstarch to 1 pint (2 cups) milk, sweetened to taste and flavoured with vanilla or lemon peel; the recipe itself gives no proportions and refers you back to its blancmange entry. Slake the starch in a little cold milk first, then stir it into the hot milk.
- "Boil it until smooth" is the hingeCornstarch must actually reach a boil and hold it a minute or two, stirring constantly, or the raw starch taste stays and the set is weak. It will thicken well before it boils; keep going past that point.
- Setting and turning outPour the hot mixture into a wetted mould or basin and chill several hours until firm. Press a round of parchment onto the surface if you object to skin. Dip the mould briefly in warm water to release it.
- Two pounds of fruitThat is roughly 900 g — a generous amount for one pudding. Stone fruit, berries, rhubarb stalks, apples and pears all work; add sugar to taste and only a splash of water, as the fruit gives up plenty.
- Cook the fruit gentlyBerries collapse in a few minutes; apple and pear quarters want 10 to 15 minutes barely simmering so they hold their shape. Cool completely before assembling, or the warm syrup will slump the pudding.
- AssemblyUnmould the set cornstarch into the centre of a shallow dish and spoon the fruit and its syrup around it. It is meant to be eaten cold, on the day it is made; the starch turns spongy and weeps after a second day in the refrigerator.
Cornstarch reached British kitchens in the middle of the nineteenth century as a cheap, reliable thickener, and household books seized on it as a way to make blancmange without isinglass, calf's-foot jelly or expensive gelatine. Where the older blancmange depended on almonds and animal gelatine and could fail outright, a cornstarch mould set dependably on a cook's-wages budget, and it was less a novelty than a method to be varied. Pairing the plain white mould with two pounds of stewed fruit is thrift of the same kind: the pudding supplies bulk and the fruit, whatever the season has produced, supplies the flavour and the colour.