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Chocolate Meringue Pudding
2 cups milk, 1/4 cup cornstarch, 1 ounce Walter Baker & Co.'s Premium No. 1 Chocolate, 2 eggs, 1/2 cup powdered sugar, 1/4 teaspoon salt, 1/2 teaspoon vanilla.
Mix cornstarch with one-half cup milk. Scald remaining milk with chocolate. Add cornstarch mixture gradually, while stirring constantly, and cook fifteen minutes. Beat yolks of eggs and add sugar, reserving two tablespoons. Pour hot mixture gradually, while stirring constantly, on egg mixture and add salt. Turn into a buttered pudding dish and bake twenty minutes in a moderate oven. Beat whites of eggs until stiff and add gradually, while beating constantly, reserved sugar. Spread meringue on pudding and cook in a slow oven ten minutes. Serve either hot or cold.
A cornstarch-thickened chocolate blancmange finished with a baked meringue, from a booklet issued to sell baking chocolate. It works as written; a few of its terms need translating.
- The chocolateWalter Baker's Premium No. 1 was plain unsweetened chocolate, sold in cakes scored into ounce squares. Any unsweetened baking chocolate is a direct substitute; semisweet is not, being already sweetened.
- "Powdered sugar"In American books of this period powdered sugar means finely ground granulated sugar, not the cornstarch-cut confectioners' sugar sold today. Use superfine or ordinary granulated; both dissolve fine in the meringue.
- Oven temperatures'Moderate oven' is usually reckoned at somewhere around 350F for the twenty-minute bake. The 'slow oven' for setting the meringue is lower, roughly 275-325F, low enough to dry and colour it without weeping.
- The fifteen-minute cookThat length over direct heat will scorch milk and chocolate. Use a heavy pan over low heat, or a double boiler, and stir throughout. The starch must reach a full bubble at least briefly or the pudding stays chalky and thin.
- TemperingThe hinge of the recipe. Pour the hot starch mixture into the yolks in a thin stream while whisking; dumping it in at once gives you sweet chocolate scrambled egg.
- Meringue timingSpread the whites over the pudding while it is still hot from the oven. Meringue set on a cooled surface separates and pools liquid underneath.
- VanillaThe ingredient list calls for half a teaspoon but the method never adds it. Stir it in off the heat, after the yolks, so it is not driven off by the long cooking.
- Yield and dishTwo cups of milk fills a 1-quart buttered baking dish and serves four. Served cold it firms considerably; a wide shallow dish gives a better ratio of meringue to pudding.
This comes from one of the promotional recipe booklets Walter Baker & Co. of Dorchester, Massachusetts distributed for decades, in which every chocolate or cocoa recipe names the company's own product by grade. Booklets of this kind often carried recipes credited to Boston-area cooking-school teachers, and the phrasing here — "scald," "turn into a buttered pudding dish," the level measurements — belongs to that school's house style. The dish itself is a cornstarch pudding of the sort that spread through American kitchens once cheap boxed cornstarch made blancmange possible without isinglass or calf's-foot jelly; the meringue lid is the thrifty half of the recipe, using the whites left over from the yolks that enrich the pudding.