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Corn-Flour Pudding, Baked
Add three and a half ounces of corn-flour to one quart of milk; boil for eight minutes, stirring it briskly all the time. Allow it to cool, and then mix thoroughly with it two eggs well beaten, and three table-spoonfuls of sugar. Flavour to taste, and bake for half an hour in a moderate oven, or brown it before the fire.
A plain milk pudding thickened with cornstarch and set with egg — the Victorian nursery and invalid standby. Two things decide whether it works: the starch must be cooked out properly, and the base must cool before the eggs go in.
- Corn-flour is cornstarchIn British usage corn-flour means the fine white starch sold in the US as cornstarch, not cornmeal. Substituting cornmeal gives an entirely different, gritty pudding.
- QuantitiesThree and a half ounces of cornstarch is about 100 g, roughly a scant cup. The quart is an imperial quart of 40 fl oz (5 cups); a US quart of 4 cups will give a noticeably stiffer pudding, which some may prefer.
- The eight-minute boilCornstarch thickens within a minute of reaching a simmer, but the sustained cooking is what drives off the raw, chalky starch taste. Keep it moving with a whisk over moderate heat — a heavy pan matters, since a starch-thick mixture scorches on the bottom without warning.
- Cool before adding eggsThis is the hinge. The mixture must drop to warm — hand-hot at most — or the beaten eggs will set into threads. Stir a ladle of the warm base into the eggs first, then return it all to the pan.
- Moderate oven350F (175C). Half an hour in a buttered dish holding about 6 cups; the pudding is done when the centre is just set and no longer sloshes. Standing the dish in a pan of hot water gives a smoother set.
- "Brown it before the fire"An open hearth or the front of a range was used to colour the top. A broiler for two or three minutes does the same, but the pudding must be fully baked first — the broiler only browns.
- FlavouringLeft open deliberately. Vanilla, grated lemon zest, a scrape of nutmeg over the top, or bay leaf infused into the milk before the starch goes in are all period-appropriate. Three tablespoons of sugar is restrained by modern taste; the pudding takes twice that comfortably.
- YieldServes five or six as a dessert. It is good warm and firms considerably when chilled, at which point it may turn out of a mould.
Cornstarch reached British and American kitchens in the middle of the nineteenth century as an industrial product — refined from maize and marketed as a cheap, keeping substitute for arrowroot and ground rice, which had been the standard thickeners for milk puddings. It is a formula more than a dish: milk, starch, egg, sugar, flavour to taste, and the technique transfers to blancmange, moulded shapes and the countless "invalid" puddings the period prescribed for the sick and the very young. Milk puddings of this kind were considered nourishing and easily digested, which is why so many Victorian cookbooks give them in near-identical variations; the baked version with egg sits a step above the plain boiled mould, since the egg gives it enough body to hold a browned top.