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Snow Pudding
1 pint boiling water 3 tablespoons cornstarch 2 tablespoons white sugar Pinch of salt 2 eggs (whites beaten).
Stir cornstarch, boiling water, sugar and salt until it thickens. After it is cooked and while hot add the whites of 2 eggs beaten to a stiff froth. Cornstarch sauce.
A stovetop cornstarch pudding lightened with beaten whites, filed under boiled puddings because it is cooked in water over heat rather than baked. It takes about ten minutes of actual work.
- Slurry the cornstarch firstDumping boiling water onto dry cornstarch guarantees lumps. Mix the 3 tablespoons with 3-4 tablespoons of cold water to a smooth cream, then whisk that into the boiling water with the sugar and salt.
- Cook it outOnce it thickens, keep it at a bare simmer for a full 2 minutes, whisking. Cornstarch that is only just thickened tastes chalky and can thin again as it stands.
- The pint is probably imperialThis is a Montreal book, so the pint is 20 fluid ounces, about 2 1/2 US cups. A US pint of 2 cups gives a firmer pudding; either works, and the thinner version sets softer.
- Folding the whitesTake the pan off the heat, then fold the stiff whites into the hot starch in two or three additions. Beating them in vigorously collapses the froth and you lose the "snow".
- Raw-egg noteThe residual heat of the hot starch cooks the whites only partially. If you are serving anyone elderly, pregnant or immune-compromised, use pasteurized egg whites.
- Sugar is deliberately lowSugar is low -- Two tablespoons in a pint is barely sweet, which suggests the pudding was not meant to be eaten unaccompanied. If you serve it plain, raise the sugar to about 1/3 cup and add a teaspoon of vanilla or the zest of a lemon.
- Setting and servingPour into a wetted mould or individual cups and chill at least 3 hours. Serves 4. Press plastic wrap onto the surface or it forms a skin.
- "Cornstarch sauce"The recipe ends with the bare words 'Cornstarch sauce.', which may be a serving note or a pointer to a separate recipe elsewhere in the book; the original gives no proportions here. A thin milk-and-cornstarch pouring sauce, cooked until it just coats a spoon, is the usual reading.
Snow pudding belongs to the family of cheap white moulded desserts that spread through North American kitchens once cornstarch became a cheap grocery staple in the second half of the nineteenth century; before that a comparable dish meant arrowroot, rice flour or ground almonds. The name refers only to the appearance, the beaten whites turning a plain white starch pudding light and opaque, and the same title covers a quite different American dessert made with gelatin and lemon. Its presence in the Five Roses Cook Book, published by the Lake of the Woods Milling Company to promote its flour, reflects the pattern of such books: alongside the bread and cake recipes that sold flour sat a broad household repertoire of thrifty everyday sweets, and this one uses a pint of water, two eggs and a spoonful or two of sugar to feed a family.