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Chocolate Pudding (Quart milk cup cornstarch eggs)
1 quart milk, 1/3 cup cornstarch, 2 eggs, 1/2 cup powdered sugar, 1/4 teaspoon salt, 2 ounces Walter Baker & Co.'s Premium No. 1 Chocolate, 1/2 cup granulated sugar.
Mix cornstarch with one-half cup cold milk. Scald remaining milk, with chocolate and one-half cup sugar, and add cornstarch mixture gradually, while stirring constantly, and let cook fifteen minutes. Beat eggs until light, and add, gradually, sugar and salt. Stir into hot mixture and cook ten minutes. Pour into individual moulds, first dipped in cold water, and chill thoroughly. Remove from moulds to serving-dish, arranging in the form of a circle. Pile in centre whipped cream sweetened and flavored with vanilla.
A cornstarch blancmange enriched with egg, from one of the pamphlets Walter Baker & Co. issued to sell its baking chocolate. The recipe works as written; the only real risks are scorching and lumps.
- The chocolatePremium No. 1 was Baker's unsweetened chocolate, sold in solid cakes. Use 2 oz unsweetened baking chocolate, chopped, not cocoa powder and not semisweet, or the sugar balance shifts. "Premium" here appears to have meant grade, not sweetness.
- Powdered sugarIn this period "powdered" meant finely ground granulated, not the cornstarch-cut confectioners' sugar sold today. Granulated works for both quantities; total sugar is 1 cup for a quart of milk.
- Use a double boilerTwenty-five minutes of total cooking over direct heat will scorch a milk-and-cornstarch mixture on a modern thin-bottomed pan. A double boiler, or a heavy pan over low heat with constant stirring, is the safer reading of these timings.
- Tempering the eggsThe instruction to stir beaten eggs straight into the hot mixture assumes you do it in a thin stream while whisking. Better to whisk a cup of the hot starch base into the eggs first, then return it all to the pan, or you get threads of cooked egg.
- The second ten minutesOnce the eggs are in, cook only until the pudding thickens further and loses any raw-starch taste, a few minutes at most. Held at a hard boil it will thin out, as prolonged heat breaks down cornstarch's set.
- MouldsDipping the moulds in cold water, rather than oiling them, helps the pudding release. Small ramekins, teacups or a 1-quart mould all work; the recipe says only to chill thoroughly, so allow several hours, and press plastic wrap on the surface if you object to skin.
- YieldAbout six to eight individual moulds. No quantity is given for the whipped cream; about a cup of heavy cream, whipped, sweetened lightly and flavoured with vanilla, is enough for the centre.
This is company literature as much as cookery. Walter Baker & Co. of Dorchester, Massachusetts, traced its chocolate mills back to the 1760s and by the turn of the twentieth century was issuing small recipe booklets, with recipes credited to a group of Boston cooking-school teachers, Maria Parloa and Janet McKenzie Hill prominently among them. The pudding itself belongs to the large family of moulded cornstarch desserts that dominated American home dessert-making once cheap cornstarch became available in the mid-nineteenth century: blancmange, cornstarch cake, chocolate cream. They were prized because they set without gelatin, needed no oven, and unmoulded into shapes that looked like far more work than they were. The arrangement here, a ring of turned-out moulds with whipped cream piled in the middle, is a small echo of the formal dinner-table service of the 1890s, where the visual composition of a dessert mattered as much as its flavour.