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Kiss Pudding
Boil one quart of sweet milk; dissolve six tablespoons of cornstarch (or flour) in a little cold milk, then add this to the boiling milk, then beaten yolks of three eggs and one-half cup of sugar, flavor to taste. Beat the whites of the eggs, sweeten, spread on top and brown in the oven, or cook the whites with the pudding and when cold pour it over sliced oranges that have been sweetened.
— Mrs. Frances Pepper
A cornstarch blancmange with a meringue top — the same family as the lemon and chocolate "cream pies" of the same era. The one thing to get right is the starch: it must come to a full boil and stay there briefly, or the pudding will taste pasty and loosen as it cools.
- Quantities in modern termsOne quart of milk is 4 cups; six tablespoons of cornstarch is a firm set, closer to a moulded pudding than a soft one. If you want a spoonable custard, four tablespoons is enough for a quart.
- "Sweet milk"Simply fresh, unsoured whole milk — the phrase distinguished it from the buttermilk or clabbered milk also kept in a nineteenth-century kitchen. Use whole milk; low-fat gives a thin, chalky result.
- Cornstarch or flour is not a straight swapThe recipe offers either, but flour has roughly half the thickening power of cornstarch and needs longer cooking to lose its raw taste. If using flour, expect to increase it and to hold the pudding at a simmer several minutes.
- Tempering the yolksThe original adds beaten yolks straight to the boiling mixture. Whisk a ladle of the hot pudding into the yolks first, then return it to the pan and cook a minute or two more; otherwise you get threads of scrambled egg through it.
- Flavoring"Flavor to taste" is left open; vanilla, lemon extract, or a little grated nutmeg are the usual period choices. A teaspoon of vanilla, or the zest of a lemon steeped in the milk, both suit it.
- Browning the meringueBeat the three whites to soft peaks with about 3 tablespoons of sugar and spread over the hot pudding to the edges of the dish. The original says only "brown in the oven" and gives no temperature; a hot oven around 400F for a few minutes, watched closely, will do it. Spreading it on the pudding while still hot helps set the underside of the meringue.
- The second methodFolding the sweetened whites into the hot pudding gives a lighter, fluffier cream — closer to a floating-island mixture. That version is the one meant for pouring over sweetened sliced oranges, and it should be thoroughly chilled first.
- YieldA quart of milk plus starch and eggs serves six to eight in a shallow 2-quart baking dish.
Cornstarch puddings like this one spread through American home cooking in the second half of the nineteenth century, after commercially milled corn starch became cheap and widely sold; it let a cook stretch three eggs across a quart of milk where an old-style baked custard would have wanted six or more. Fanciful names for such puddings were common in community cookbooks — "kiss pudding" is generally understood to refer to the meringue, since stiff sweetened egg-white was itself called a "kiss" in period recipe books, the little baked drops being sold and served under that name.