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Chocolate Pudding From Larkin Prepared Chocolate Pudding
Moisten the contents of the package in three-fourths of a cup of cold milk. Scald the remainder of a quart of milk and into it stir the moistened powder. Cook ten minutes, stirring constantly. Pour into molds and serve hot or cold, with whipped or plain cream or milk. Sugar may be added if not sweet enough. This quantity makes one quart of pudding.
This is a package-mix recipe for a product that has not been sold in over a century, so the first job is working out what the package contained. Everything else is straightforward stovetop custard technique.
- The missing packageJudging by the method, Larkin Prepared Chocolate was a cocoa-and-starch powder with some sugar already in it, sold in a box whose weight the recipe never gives, so the quantity is genuinely unknown. A modern cook-and-serve chocolate pudding mix of the size meant for 2 cups of milk will not stretch to the full quart called for here, so plan on two boxes if you substitute.
- Quart of milk, and where it goesThree-quarters of a cup is held back cold to slurry the powder; the remaining 3 1/4 cups are scalded. Slurrying first is what keeps the starch from seizing into lumps when it hits hot milk.
- Scalded milkBring it to about 180F, when the surface shivers and a ring of small bubbles forms at the edge. It should not boil.
- Ten minutes of cookingStarch-thickened puddings generally need to reach a bubbling boil briefly to lose the raw starch taste and set properly, but ten minutes over direct heat risks scorching. Use a heavy pan over medium-low heat, or a double boiler, and stir into the corners the whole time, as the recipe directs.
- MoldsRinse the molds with cold water and do not dry them; the film of water lets the set pudding slip out. Individual cups of about 6 oz work better than one large mold for a starch pudding, which is softer than a gelatin one.
- SkinIf the pudding is to be served cold, press plastic wrap or buttered paper directly onto the surface while hot, or a skin will form as it chills. Chill until set firm.
- SweetnessThe instruction to add sugar "if not sweet enough" suggests the mix carried only modest sweetening, or that the maker was allowing for varying taste. Add sugar with the scalding milk rather than at the end so it dissolves.
- YieldOne quart, which is six to eight servings in modern portions.
The Larkin Company of Buffalo, New York, began in the 1870s as a soap manufacturer and grew into one of the great American mail-order houses, selling groceries, coffee, spices and prepared foods direct to households under its "Factory-to-Family" slogan, with premiums of furniture and china thrown in for club orders. Its packaged goods reached kitchens direct rather than through a grocer, and recipes like this one, printed with the brand name in the title, were part of the arrangement: the cookbook taught you what to do with what had been delivered. The recipe itself belongs to the first wave of American convenience desserts, in which the cook's contribution was reduced to milk, heat and ten minutes of stirring, and it sits alongside the same period's boxed gelatins and self-rising flours as a marker of how quickly branded powders moved into home cooking around the turn of the twentieth century.