Home › Desserts-Puddings › Date Pudding (C sugar T cornstarch C water)
Date Pudding (C sugar T cornstarch C water)
1 C sugar 3 T cornstarch 3 C water Put dates and walnuts through food chopper, add other ingredients and boil until thick. Chill and serve with whipped cream. Serves ten persons.
Mrs. Nellie Ray.
1 pkg. dates. 1 C walnut meats. Mrs. Richard Earl. 1½ C sugar 1 C graham flour 1 lb. dates
The text as printed has been scrambled — part of a second recipe's ingredient list has run into the first, and the walnuts are never quantified. What is recoverable is a simple cornstarch-thickened date pudding, boiled on the stove and chilled.
- The ingredient list is corruptThe method calls for dates and walnuts, but the quantities given at the top are only sugar, cornstarch and water. The trailing "1½ C sugar, 1 C graham flour, 1 lb. dates" reads like the opening of a second, different recipe that has run into this one. If you cook it, 1 lb dates is a plausible amount and about 1 cup walnuts works, but both are reconstruction, not the author's measure.
- Cornstarch ratio3 tablespoons cornstarch to 3 cups liquid gives a soft spoonable pudding that sets on chilling, not a moulded one. If you want it firm enough to unmould, the ratio needs to be closer to 2 tablespoons per cup.
- "Boil until thick"Cornstarch reaches full thickening power at a bare boil and must actually reach it — a slurry held below simmer stays chalky. Once it bubbles, one to two minutes of steady stirring is enough; prolonged boiling breaks the starch down and thins the pudding again.
- Slurry the starch firstWhisk the cornstarch into a little of the cold water before it meets the hot pot. Dumping dry starch into warm liquid gives lumps that no amount of beating will disperse.
- The food chopperA hand-cranked grinder clamped to the table edge. A food processor pulsed briefly does the same job, but dates gum the blade — toss them with a spoonful of the sugar first, or chop by hand with an oiled knife.
- SweetnessA pound of dates plus a cup of sugar in three cups of water is very sweet by current taste. Cutting the sugar to half a cup will not spoil the set; if anything it firms it a little, since the cornstarch does the thickening.
- Chilling and skinPress plastic wrap directly onto the surface before it goes into the refrigerator, or the pudding forms a rubbery skin. Allow at least three hours.
- YieldTen servings as stated, which implies small portions by current standards; expect six to eight modern ones.
Church and ladies'-aid cookbooks of the early twentieth century are full of cornstarch puddings, and dates appear in them constantly — pressed dates shipped well and kept indefinitely in the pantry, and the Mediterranean and later Californian date trade is generally said to have expanded around the turn of the century. The pairing of dates with walnuts, in puddings, breads and steamed cakes, is a commonplace of American community cookbooks. The double attribution here — Mrs. Nellie Ray and Mrs. Richard Earl — is best explained by the trailing ingredient line: Mrs. Richard Earl appears to be the contributor of the following recipe, whose heading has been lost in the same typesetting failure. The garbled ingredient list is equally characteristic. These books were typeset locally, often by a printer working from handwritten slips, and columns of ingredients ran together with some regularity.