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Rebecca Pudding
4 cups scalded milk 1/2 cup corn-starch 1/4 cup sugar 1/4 teaspoon salt 1/2 cup cold milk 1 teaspoon vanilla Whites 3 eggs Mix corn-starch, sugar, and salt, dilute with cold milk, add to scalded milk, stirring constantly until mixture thickens, afterwards occasionally; cook fifteen minutes. Add flavoring and whites of eggs beaten stiff, mix thoroughly, mould, chill, and serve with Yellow Sauce I or II.
A cornstarch blancmange lightened with beaten whites — the sort of plain moulded pudding that stood in for custard when eggs were dear. It succeeds or fails on how thoroughly the starch is cooked.
- Cook the starch out fullyThe fifteen minutes is not padding: cornstarch tastes chalky and raw until it has been held near boiling long enough to hydrate completely. Use a heavy pan over low heat, or a double boiler, and stir often — the bottom scorches easily once the mixture is thick.
- MeasuresHalf a cup of cornstarch is about 65 g; four cups of milk is one quart, 950 ml. "Scalded milk" means heated until it steams and shivers at the edges, around 180F, not boiled.
- Slaking the starchDiluting the dry mix with the half cup of cold milk before it meets the hot milk is what prevents lumps. Pour the slurry into the hot milk in a thin stream while whisking.
- The egg whitesThey are folded into a very hot base, which sets them and may partially cook them, but the residual heat cannot be relied on to bring them to a safe temperature; work quickly and mix thoroughly so no streaks of unset white remain. If you are serving anyone who should avoid undercooked egg, use pasteurized whites, or return the pudding to gentle heat for two or three minutes after folding.
- "Mould"Rinse a plain mould, bowl or individual cups with cold water and do not dry them; the film of water lets the chilled pudding slip out. Chill at least four hours, and unmould onto a cold plate.
- Yellow SauceThe referenced sauces are elsewhere in the book; the name suggests a yolk-based custard sauce, which would use up the yolks left over from this recipe. Any thin vanilla custard sauce, served cold, does the same job.
- YieldAbout a quart and a half of pudding, serving six to eight.
Cornstarch puddings like this one belong to the second half of the nineteenth century, when refined corn starch became a cheap packaged staple in American groceries and cooks could thicken a quart of milk for pennies rather than with six or eight eggs. Cookery schools of the Fannie Farmer generation drilled the technique — slake, scald, thicken, cook long — and printed many variations under fanciful names, including personal names of the sort you see here. The origin of "Rebecca" is not documented; such titles may have been borrowed from a contributor or a household favorite, and no particular Rebecca can be attached to it with any confidence. The direction to serve it with a yolk-based sauce fits a period pattern of using up what a recipe left over, though this page alone does not establish it as a rule.