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Strawberry Cornflour Pudding
Take three ounces of cornflour, one ounce of butter, two ounces of sugar, and a pint and a half of milk; mix together, put in a saucepan, bring to the boil, and simmer for five minutes, then remove and cool a little. Beat in the yolks of two eggs and the white of one, and put the mixture in a layer at the bottom and sides of a deep buttered pie-dish. About a quarter of it should be reserved. Put in the centre of the pie-dish as many picked strawberries as may be necessary to fill it, and the rest of the mixture over them. Beat the remaining white of an egg with a tea-spoonful of sugar and spread it over the top. Then bake the pudding in a gentle oven for about fifteen minutes until it is nicely browned. Probable cost, 1s. 6d.
A Victorian cornflour mould dressed up as a baked pudding: a thick cornstarch custard lining a dish, strawberries in the middle, a thin meringue on top. Two details in the original need attention — the slaking of the starch and what a "gentle oven" actually means.
- Cornflour is cornstarchBritish cornflour is the fine white starch sold as cornstarch in the United States, not the fine-ground maize meal sold under that name elsewhere. Cornmeal here would give a gritty, entirely different pudding.
- Slake it cold"Mix together, put in a saucepan, bring to the boil" glosses over the hinge of the dish. Whisk the cornflour and sugar to a smooth paste with a little of the cold milk, then stir in the rest and heat; dropping dry starch into warm milk gives lumps that no amount of simmering will clear.
- The measures3 oz cornflour is about ⅔ cup, 1 oz butter 2 tablespoons, 2 oz sugar ¼ cup. A pint and a half imperial is 30 fl oz, roughly 3½ US cups of milk.
- Tempering the eggsCool the cooked starch to about blood heat before beating in the yolks, or they will scramble in strands.
- A gentle ovenAround 300–325F. The custard is already cooked; the fifteen minutes is only to set the eggs and colour the meringue. A hot oven will weep the meringue and split the starch layer.
- The meringue is thin by modern standardsOne white with a teaspoon of sugar makes a slack foam that browns rather than crisps. If you want a meringue that holds, allow an ounce of sugar to the white and expect a longer, slower bake.
- The strawberriesUse firm, dry berries and hull them; ripe fruit releases a great deal of juice into the starch and can make the lining slump. 'Picked' in the original most likely means picked over -- hulled and sorted, not necessarily halved.
- Yield and servingThe recipe gives no dish size or yield; a deep dish of about 1½ quarts would suit, serving around six. Best served just warm or at room temperature; chilled overnight the cornflour turns chalky and the fruit bleeds.
- Probable cost1s 6d was the book's own guide for a household comparing dishes, not a modern figure -- starch and milk stretching a small quantity of expensive fruit.
Cornflour puddings run through late-Victorian cookery books in dozens of variations, and they exist because refined maize starch became a cheap branded grocery in Britain from the middle of the nineteenth century — sold in packets and advertised heavily as a wholesome, digestible thickener for invalids and children. It was cheaper than the older arrowroot and sago, and appears to have taken over much of their work. What you have here is essentially a blancmange enriched with egg yolk, lined into a dish and baked, which puts it halfway between a mould and a queen of puddings; the single-white meringue cap is the same economising gesture that queen of puddings makes with its jam and froth. Cassell's is a large alphabetical household dictionary aimed at middle-class kitchens with a servant or two, and it gives a probable cost so that one dish could be weighed against another. Strawberries had a short, expensive English season, and a recipe that surrounds a modest quantity of them with a pint and a half of milk is making the most of them.