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Raspberry Crown
2 tablespoons water 2 tablespoons cornstarch 1 cup boiling raspberry juice 1 egg Pinch of salt Lemon extract Cook until creamy. Put into mould.
When cold, serve with raspberries or whipped cream.
A cornstarch-set fruit mould, printed among the pudding sauces because it doubles as one: unmoulded it is a dessert, broken up with a spoon it is a sauce for plain cake or steamed pudding. The whole thing hinges on how the egg goes in.
- Temper the eggBeat the egg with the 2 tablespoons of water and the cornstarch to a smooth slurry before any heat touches it, then add the boiling juice in a thin stream while whisking. Dumping a whole egg into boiling juice gives you sweet raspberry scrambled egg, and no amount of beating will fix it.
- "Cook until creamy"Over direct heat this means about 1 to 2 minutes at a bare simmer after it thickens, stirring constantly. Cornstarch needs to reach near-boiling to lose its raw, chalky taste, but prolonged hard boiling with egg in the pan will curdle it; a heavy pan or a double boiler is the safer route.
- Raspberry juiceOne cup of juice takes roughly 1 to 1 1/2 lb of raspberries, fresh or frozen, simmered briefly with a splash of water and strained. Bottled raspberry cocktail is heavily diluted and will set into something pale and thin.
- No sugar is givenPresumably the juice was already sweetened when it was put up, or the raspberries served alongside were meant to carry the sweetness. Taste the hot juice and sweeten it before adding the starch: 2 to 4 tablespoons of sugar per cup is the usual range.
- Lemon extractAn unmeasured flourish. Use 1/4 teaspoon, stirred in off the heat, since alcohol-based extracts lose their aroma to steam. Lemon zest or a teaspoon of juice does the same job with less of the candied note.
- The mouldThis makes about 1 1/2 cups, enough for a 2-cup mould or four small cups, serving four as a sauce or two as a dessert. Rinse the mould with cold water rather than oiling it; cornstarch gels release cleanly from a wet surface.
- Setting time"When cold" means fully chilled, at least 3 hours and better overnight. Cornstarch sets soft compared with gelatin, so a shallow wide mould unmoulds more reliably than a tall crown, whatever the name promises.
The Five Roses Cook Book was published by the Lake of the Woods Milling Company of Montreal and Winnipeg as advertising for its Five Roses flour, and its recipes were solicited from Canadian housewives across the Dominion. Cornstarch moulds of this kind belong to the long nineteenth-century family of blancmanges and "cream" puddings, which shifted from expensive gelatin and ground almonds to cheap boxed cornstarch after corn starch manufacture became a large North American industry in the second half of the 1800s. The reliance on raspberry juice points to a household with a summer's worth of bottled fruit in the cellar, and the fluted tin mould supplied a bit of table ceremony available to anyone who owned the tin.