Home › Desserts › Chocolate (Tablespoons cornstarch cup)
Chocolate (Tablespoons cornstarch cup)
4 tablespoons cornstarch + cup sugar 2 tablespoons hot water whites of 2 eggs 1 teaspoon salt ½ teaspoon vanilla Mix constarch, sugar, salt and milk; melt chocolate; add water, cornstarch mixture, and cook in double boiler ten minutes; cool; add well-beaten egg whites, flavoring, and mold. Chill and serve with sugar and cream. 1 quart milk 1 junket tablet 1/4 cup sugar
This is a chocolate cornstarch blancmange, and the page as printed is in poor shape: the milk and chocolate quantities have dropped out of the ingredient list, and a stray three lines from the junket recipe that followed it have been swept in at the end. Beyond the typesetting, the method has one step that rules it out for a modern kitchen.
- Raw egg white, never cookedThe cornstarch base is cooked for ten minutes, then cooled, and only then are the beaten whites folded in and the pudding molded and chilled. The whites are never brought to any temperature at all. A chilled dessert built on uncooked egg white carries a real salmonella risk and should not be made from these instructions; use a current recipe for chocolate cornstarch pudding instead.
- The ingredient list is incompleteNo quantity of milk is given for the pudding itself, and no quantity of chocolate at all, though the method calls for melting it. "+ cup sugar" is a mangled fraction that could be a quarter, a half or two-thirds. There is no honest way to reconstruct these from the page.
- The junket lines are not part of this recipe"1 quart milk, 1 junket tablet, 1/4 cup sugar" appears to belong to a separate rennet dessert that ran alongside this one. A junket tablet is compressed rennet, which sets milk into a soft curd at blood heat rather than by cooking; it has nothing to do with a cooked cornstarch mold.
- A teaspoon of salt is almost certainly wrongA teaspoon of salt looks wrong -- a sweet pudding on this scale would normally take a small fraction of that, and the figure may be a misprint for a fractional measure.
- Lowney's chocolateChocolate -- In a book issued by a chocolate manufacturer, unqualified "chocolate" most likely means unsweetened baking chocolate in cakes or squares rather than cocoa powder or eating chocolate. The two are not interchangeable by weight, since the cake carries roughly half its weight in cocoa butter.
- Double boilerCornstarch and milk scorch on direct heat, hence cooking over water. Undercooked cornstarch can weep in the mold.
- Molding"Mold" would mean individual cups or a single mold, customarily rinsed in cold water so the pudding turns out clean. "Serve with sugar and cream" most likely means plain pouring cream at the table.
Lowney's Cook Book was compiled by Maria Willett Howard and issued by the Walter M. Lowney Company, the Boston chocolate manufacturer, in the first decade of the twentieth century. It belongs to a genre that flourished around 1900: the manufacturer's cookbook, given away or sold cheaply, in which a full general cookery text is built around one company's product, so that chocolate turns up in far more of the dessert chapter than any household would ordinarily use. The dish itself is a chocolate blancmange, a descendant of the medieval white blanc manger that had by the nineteenth century lost its almonds and chicken and become simply milk thickened and molded. American cooks used cornstarch, cheap and reliable after the corn-starch industry established itself in the mid-1800s, where English recipes still called for arrowroot or isinglass; the beaten whites folded in at the end were meant to lighten what would otherwise be a dense, sliceable mold. The junket lines stranded at the foot of this entry are a reminder of how these books were set: recipes ran together in tight columns, and a slipped line of type could migrate from one dessert to the next.