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Cream Chocolate Pudding
1 pint of milk 1/2 cup of sugar 4 eggs 4 tablespoonfuls of corn starch 2 ounces of chocolate 1 teaspoonful of vanilla Put the chocolate in a saucepan, and stand it over the teakettle to melt; stir until perfectly smooth. Put the milk on to boil in a farina boiler; moisten the corn starch with a little cold water (about a quarter-cup), and add it to the boiling milk; cook and stir until thick and smooth. Beat the whites of the eggs to a stiff froth; add the sugar to the milk, then the whites, and beat all well together over the fire. Take from the fire, add the vanilla. Now take out one-third of the mixture, add to it the chocolate; mix well. Dip a plain pudding mould into cold water, put in the bottom of it half the white mixture, then all the dark, and then the remainder of the white. Stand on the ice for three hours to harden. Serve with Vanilla Sauce poured around it.
CREAM CORN STARCH PUDDING (VANILLA) 1 pint of milk 1/2 cup of sugar 1 teaspoonful of vanilla 4 even tablespoonfuls of corn starch 4 eggs (86) Make the same as Chocolate Pudding, omitting the chocolate, and adding the vanilla to the whole pudding.
A moulded cornstarch blancmange in two colours, set with ice rather than gelatine. The starch and the beaten whites do all the work, so the proportions matter more than the technique.
- Farina boilerAn older name for a double boiler. Use a heatproof bowl or an inner pan over simmering water; the milk-and-starch mixture scorches easily over direct heat.
- Melting over the teakettleStanding the chocolate pan over a kettle of boiling water is an improvised bain-marie. A bowl over barely simmering water does the same; keep the heat gentle and keep water or steam out of the chocolate, which is what makes it seize.
- The chocolateTwo ounces of 1880s "chocolate" means unsweetened baking chocolate, not a modern eating bar. Semi-sweet will work but will push the dark layer noticeably sweeter than the white.
- Cornstarch measureFour tablespoons to a pint of milk is a stiff set, deliberately so, because the pudding has to stand up out of a mould. If you plan to serve it in glasses, three is enough.
- YolksOnly the whites are used. Four yolks are left over; they keep a day or two covered in the refrigerator.
- Cooking the whitesBeat the whites in over the fire and keep the mixture moving until it is thick and no longer smells of raw egg, roughly a minute or two at a bare simmer. Hard boiling after the whites go in will curdle them into threads.
- "Stand on the ice"An icebox instruction. Three hours in the refrigerator is right; the mould wants to be thoroughly cold and firm before you turn it out.
- UnmouldingWetting the mould with cold water is what lets the pudding release. Dip the filled mould briefly in warm water and invert onto a chilled plate.
- YieldOne moderate mould; four to six servings.
Hot Weather Dishes is generally attributed to Sarah Tyson Rorer, principal of the Philadelphia Cooking School and one of the most widely read American cookery writers of the late nineteenth century; the book collects dishes meant to be made with as little standing over the stove as possible. Cornstarch puddings belong squarely to that project. Commercial cornstarch, sold from the 1840s onward as a cheap thickener, gave households a way to make the older gelatine and isinglass blancmanges without a stock-pot or a long boiling, and the results set firm on ice in a few hours. The two-tone moulding here — white, dark, white — is a small piece of Victorian table showmanship, the same impulse that produced striped jellies and marbled creams, achieved by nothing more than dividing one batch and stirring melted chocolate into part of it. The instruction to "stand on the ice" places the recipe in the long era of icebox refrigeration, which spans several decades.