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Caramel Pudding
1 quart milk 1 cup brown sugar 2 tablespoons cornstarch Pinch of salt 1 egg Small piece of butter Vanilla.
Put butter and brown sugar in a pan to brown. In another pan heat the milk, and when hot add the cornstarch dissolved in a little cold milk. Add the browned sugar and the egg. Cook until thick and set aside to cool. Serve with cream.
A stovetop cornstarch custard, not a true boiled pudding despite its place in the chapter. The whole character of it comes from how far you take the sugar.
- The hinge: the caramelBrown sugar and butter melted together can go from syrup to burnt very quickly over direct heat. Work on medium, swirl rather than stir, and pull the pan when it smells nutty — bitterness here cannot be fixed later.
- QuantitiesA quart is 4 cups in the American measure, though a Canadian book of this date may intend the imperial quart, nearer 5 cups. 'Small piece of butter' is perhaps a tablespoon, and the unmeasured vanilla perhaps a teaspoon; it is usually stirred in at the end.
- Adding the hot caramelPour the molten sugar into the hot thickened milk in a thin stream while whisking. It will seize and hiss; keep it over low heat and it dissolves back in within a minute or two.
- The eggBeat the egg in a bowl, whisk a ladleful of the hot mixture into it, then return the lot to the pan. Added straight to the hot milk as written, it scrambles.
- How thick it getsTwo tablespoons of cornstarch to a quart of milk is a loose set — a pouring custard rather than something that will unmould. Cook it two or three minutes after it thickens to lose the raw starch taste, then stop; overcooked cornstarch thins again.
- CoolingPress plastic wrap or buttered paper directly onto the surface or you get a skin. Let it cool thoroughly; it firms noticeably as it cools.
- YieldAbout six in small dishes; the original says only 'serve with cream'.
The Five Roses Cook Book was issued by the Lake of the Woods Milling Company of Montreal and Winnipeg and circulated in enormous numbers through Canadian households in the years around the First World War, sold cheaply or given away in connection with sacks of Five Roses flour. Its recipes were collected from ordinary Canadian cooks, which may help explain the telegraphic style here — no oven, no timings, no yield, because the writer assumed a reader who had made cornstarch puddings before. Those puddings were a product of the mid-nineteenth-century corn-milling industry, which put cheap boxed cornstarch in every grocery and gave home cooks a way to set a milk pudding without the eggs a proper custard demanded; cornstarch blancmanges are standard in cookbooks by the 1860s and 1870s. The single egg in this version is a holdover, adding richness rather than doing the thickening. Browning sugar for flavour is older still.