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Chocolate Blancmange
1 pint milk 1/4 cup sugar 3 tablespoons cornstarch 1/4 cup health cocoa 1 teaspoon caramel 1/2 teaspoon vanilla A few grains salt Heat the milk in a double boiler. Mix the sugar, cocoa, cornstarch, and salt. Pour the hot milk over this mixture, and mix thoroughly. Then return to the double boiler, add the caramel, and cook fifteen minutes, or till thickened. Add the vanilla, and pour into cups wet with cold water. When cold, unmold and serve with cream.
Maple Cup Custard (Baked) 2 cups milk 1/2 cup maple sirup 2 drops maple flavoring 3 egg yolks 1/4 teaspoon vanilla A few grains salt Warm the milk. Beat the egg yolks; beat into the yolks the sirup, flavoring, and salt; then stir into them the heated milk and beat well together. Pour into cups; set the cups in a pan of hot water, and bake till the custard is just set.
Cocoanut Custard (Boiled) 2 1/2 cups milk 1/2 cup shredded cocoanut 1/4 cup sugar 3 egg yolks A few grains salt Steep the cocoanut in the milk in a double boiler twenty minutes. Strain the cocoanut out of the hot milk, pressing it well to extract all the milk and flavor. Beat the egg yolks, then beat into them the sugar and salt. Stir the hot milk into the egg-and-sugar mixture; put it into the double boiler and cook, stirring and watching it constantly, till it just begins to thicken a little or till it just coats a spoon dipped into it. Do not expect it to set or to get as thick as baked custard; for just before it gets as thick as you expect it to, it will get thin. It will seem too thin when it is cooked sufficiently, but it will be thicker after it gets cold. A little practice is required to enable one to know when to remove a boiled custard from the fire. As soon as the custard is sufficiently cooked, set the inner cup of the double boiler which contains the custard in cold water, and stir the custard till it cools slightly. Then pour into cups or into the dish in which it is to be served, and set away to get cold.
A cornstarch pudding of the plainest sort, thickened entirely by starch rather than egg. The one thing that decides the texture is the full fifteen minutes in the double boiler.
- Don't cut the cooking shortCornstarch thickens well before it has lost its raw taste. The mixture will look done in five minutes over the water bath; hold it the full fifteen, stirring, or the finished blancmange will be chalky.
- "Health cocoa"Evidently plain unsweetened cocoa powder, the term reflecting the health-cookery context of the book. Ordinary natural or Dutch-process unsweetened cocoa is the substitute; Dutch-process gives a darker, milder result.
- "Caramel"Not caramel sauce or candy, but caramel coloring: sugar cooked black and dissolved in a little water, kept bottled for tinting and deepening flavor. A teaspoon of the modern equivalent, or simply omit it, since the cocoa carries the color.
- Mixing the dry ingredients firstSugar, cocoa, cornstarch and salt are combined dry so the starch disperses instead of lumping when the hot milk hits it. Whisk the hot milk in gradually rather than dumping it.
- Wetting the moldsRinsing the cups with cold water and leaving them wet is what lets the set pudding drop out cleanly; there is no butter or oil involved. Teacups, custard cups or small ramekins all work.
- Chilling"When cold" means thoroughly chilled, which will take several hours in the refrigerator. Press plastic wrap onto the surface if a skin is unwelcome.
- YieldA pint of milk will fill roughly three or four small molds, depending on their size. The original says only "serve with cream."
Blancmange began in medieval Europe as a genuinely white dish, almonds and shredded chicken or fish thickened with rice, and by the nineteenth century had shed the meat and become a molded milk pudding set with isinglass, gelatin, Irish moss or, most cheaply, cornstarch. The name still means "white food" even when, as here, cocoa has turned it brown. Cornstarch blancmange belonged to the era's economical, delicate-stomach cookery, and its appearance in a book of this sort alongside baked and boiled custards is characteristic: a sweet that uses no eggs and no oven, and which a cook could put up in the morning to be turned out cold at supper.