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Caramel Pudding
One tablespoon of butter One pint of milk One egg Two-thirds of a cup of sugar Three tablespoons of Larkin Corn Starch One-fourth teaspoon of Larkin Table Salt One-half teaspoon of Larkin Vanilla Flavoring Extract Put the sugar into a frying-pan and melt, shaking the pan constantly so that it will not burn. Heat the milk and blend it with the sugar. Add the Corn Starch and egg. Flavor, pour into a mold and serve cold with cream.
A dry-caramel cornstarch pudding, written in the telegraphic style of a manufacturer's recipe booklet — it assumes you already know that a starch pudding has to be cooked until it thickens. That omission is the one thing to fix.
- The hinge: it must be cookedAs written the method stops at "add the Corn Starch and egg." Cornstarch does not thicken until the mixture reaches a full boil; hold it there, stirring, for a minute or two after it thickens. This also brings the single egg well past a safe temperature.
- Caramelising the sugarTwo-thirds of a cup of sugar melted dry in a skillet will go from clear to amber fast, around 340F. Pull it off the heat while it is the colour of an old penny — past that it turns acrid, and there is no rescuing it.
- Adding the milkHot caramel meets cold or even warm milk with violent spattering, and the sugar will seize into a lump. Warm the pint of milk first, as directed, add it in a slow stream off the heat, and return the pan to low heat to dissolve any hardened caramel.
- Starch and eggDo not tip three tablespoons of dry cornstarch into hot milk. Slake it with a few tablespoons of cold milk taken from the pint, and beat the egg into that slurry; then stir the lot into the hot caramel milk.
- MeasuresOne pint of milk is two cups. Three tablespoons of cornstarch to that quantity gives a soft, spoonable set rather than a sliceable one.
- The moldRinse the mold with cold water and do not dry it — the film of water lets the pudding release. Press a round of plastic film or buttered paper on the surface if you object to skin. Chill at least four hours.
- YieldAbout four small servings. The cream poured over at table is not optional garnish; the pudding is lean and slightly bitter from the caramel and wants it.
The branded ingredients date and place this recipe as clearly as a postmark: it comes from a cookbook issued by the Larkin Company of Buffalo, the soap-and-grocery firm that built an enormous mail-order business on the "Larkin Club" plan, in which neighbours pooled orders and earned furniture and household goods as premiums. Recipe booklets were a standard part of that machinery, and the dishes in them called for the company's own goods -- here cornstarch, salt and flavouring extract -- so that a pudding became an argument for the next order. The pudding itself is conventional for the period: dry-caramelised sugar, called "burnt sugar" in many nineteenth-century books, was a cheap way to give a plain milk-and-starch dessert a strong flavour and a warm brown colour. One egg to a pint of milk suggests an economy version of the older boiled custard, with cornstarch doing most of the thickening the eggs would once have done.