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Summer Pudding
1 quart boiling water 5 tablespoons (heaping) cornstarch ¾ 3/4 3 cup granulated sugar Grated rind and juice of 1 lemon.
Let this stand while you beat the whites of 2 eggs stiff, and add these to the cornstarch mixture.
Now heat 3 cups milk in double boiler until it boils, and then add ½ cup white sugar, the yolks of 2 eggs, 1 heaping tablespoon cornstarch, 1 teaspoon vanilla. Let these 2 dishes stand until ice cold and serve putting part of the first mixture on dish with a large spoonful of the custard over it.
A two-part cold dessert: a lemon cornstarch mould and a soft custard poured over it. The printed text is compressed and one measurement has been garbled in setting, so read the whole thing before starting.
- The hinge: the cornstarch must be cookedThe instruction to "let this stand" comes after an implied cooking step that the text drops. Cornstarch stirred into a quart of boiling water will only thicken properly if it is held at a simmer for two to three minutes, stirring, until it turns from cloudy to glossy. Uncooked cornstarch tastes chalky and will not set.
- The garbled sugar quantity"¾ 3 cup granulated sugar" is a typesetting error and cannot be resolved with certainty. Something in the region of ¾ cup to a quart of liquid is a plausible reading, but the intended figure is unknown; taste and adjust.
- Slake the starch firstFive heaping tablespoons of dry cornstarch dropped into boiling water will lump instantly. Mix it to a smooth slurry with a few tablespoons of cold water, then stir that into the boiling water off the heat before returning it to the burner.
- The egg whitesThe stiff whites are added to the cornstarch mixture, which lightens it and gives the finished mould its pale, spongy body. The recipe has the starch stand while the whites are beaten, so the base will have cooled somewhat; a hotter base will give a firmer set. Note that whites treated this way are not reliably brought to a safe temperature, which matters if you are serving anyone vulnerable.
- The custardThree cups of milk, ½ cup sugar, two yolks and a heaping tablespoon of cornstarch make a pourable sauce, not a set custard. In a double boiler it will thicken to coating consistency after a few minutes; the vanilla goes in off the heat so it does not cook away.
- Chilling and moulding"Ice cold" means at least three to four hours in the refrigerator. Rinse a mould or individual cups with cold water before filling and the pudding will turn out cleanly; the recipe as written expects it to be spooned rather than unmoulded, but it is firm enough for either.
- Not actually a boiled puddingEverything is cooked on top of the stove rather than baked. Nothing is boiled in a cloth or basin, and no steamer is needed.
- YieldA quart of water plus three cups of milk makes a generous amount: eight to ten servings of mould with sauce.
Despite the name, this is not the English summer pudding of bread and macerated soft fruit, a dish long made in Britain, though the name "summer pudding" is not reliably attested in print until the twentieth century — the nineteenth-century name was hydropathic pudding. It belongs instead to the North American family of cornstarch moulds — variously called blancmange, cornstarch pudding or velvet cream — that spread through home kitchens after cornstarch became a cheap packaged staple in the second half of the nineteenth century. Their appeal was economy and coolness: a large dessert built mostly from water, milk and a few spoonfuls of starch, requiring no oven in hot weather, with the eggs stretched by using the whites in the mould and the yolks in the sauce so nothing was wasted. The Five Roses Cook Book, published by the Lake of the Woods Milling Company and assembled largely from recipes sent in by Canadian housewives, is full of such contributions, which accounts for both the domestic voice of the instructions and the occasional muddle in the printed measurements.