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Chocolate Mold
4 tablespoons cornstarch teaspoon vanilla 4 cup cold milk 2 cups scalded milk 4 cup sugar + teaspoon salt 3 egg whites cup blanched almonds 3 ounces Lowney's Premium Chocolate, melted with 2 tablespoons sugar Mix cornstarch with cold milk; add sugar, salt, scalded milk, and the melted chocolate, mixed with two tablespoons sugar. Cook in double boiler twenty minutes, stirring constantly. Cool slightly, cut, and fold in the well-beaten egg whites, keeping the mixture as fluffy as possible. Add vanilla. Decorate the bottom and sides of an oval mold with halves of almonds arranged in the shape of daisies. Pour in the cornstarch mixture, chill, remove from mold, and garnish with candied cherries and beaten cream, sweetened and flavored.
A more fancy dish is obtained by making double the recipe and putting the chocolate into half the mixture, keeping the other half white. Mold the white in small glasses or timbale molds and arrange around the oval mold. Garnish each small mold with half cherry, and the spaces between with cream forced through the pastry bag. See colored illustration, Plate I, opposite.
A cornstarch blancmange in two colors, meant to be turned out of a mold and dressed up for the table. The success of it rests entirely on cooking the starch long enough and folding the whites in while the base is still warm.
- Fractions to settle before you startSeveral quantities in this listing have lost their fractions: the cold milk, the sugar, the salt, the vanilla and the almonds are all given without them. A workable reading for a 2-cup-scalded-milk pudding is 1/4 cup cold milk to slake the cornstarch, 1/4 cup sugar in the base (it is printed as '4 cup', the same rendering as the cold milk), a small fraction of a teaspoon of salt, 1 teaspoon vanilla and perhaps 1/2 cup almonds for the lining -- but all of these are inferred rather than printed.
- The hinge: cook the starch outTwenty minutes in a double boiler with constant stirring is not padding. A double boiler deliberately keeps the mixture below boiling, so the starch needs that sustained time to gelatinize fully, lose its raw, chalky taste and set firmly enough to unmold; underdo it and the mold slumps on the plate.
- Fold, do not stir"Cool slightly, cut, and fold" means the base should still be hot to the touch but no longer steaming hard. Cutting down through the whites with the edge of a spatula and turning them over keeps the air in; stirring collapses it and gives a dense, rubbery pudding.
- Egg whitesThe whites are only partly set by the residual heat of the base. If you are serving anyone pregnant, elderly, very young or immune-compromised, use pasteurized whites in the carton, which whip adequately for folding.
- Premium ChocolateLowney's Premium was unsweetened baking chocolate. Use 3 oz unsweetened chocolate, melted with the 2 tablespoons sugar as directed; bittersweet or semisweet will make the mold noticeably sweeter and softer.
- Lining the moldRinse the mold with cold water and leave it wet, or brush it very lightly with a neutral oil, before laying in the almond halves. The almonds stick to a damp surface long enough to pour against, and the whole thing releases cleanly.
- Chilling and unmoldingGive it at least four hours in the refrigerator, and overnight is better. Dip the mold briefly in warm water, run a thin knife around the rim, and invert onto a chilled platter.
- Beaten cream"Beaten cream, sweetened and flavored" is whipped cream: about 1 cup heavy cream, 2 tablespoons sugar, a little vanilla. For piping through a pastry bag whip it to firm peaks rather than soft.
- YieldAs written the oval mold makes something on the order of six servings. The doubled version with the ring of small white molds is a party presentation and will serve roughly twice that.
Cornstarch molds like this one were the workhorse dessert of American cooking between roughly 1870 and 1930: cheap, made from pantry staples, and impressive out of proportion to the effort once turned out of a fluted or oval tin. Lowney's Cook Book belongs to a genre of manufacturer-sponsored cookbooks in which the Walter M. Lowney Company of Boston promoted its chocolate by publishing a full general cookbook around it. The two-tone treatment here, with a dark oval ringed by small white timbales and piped cream, reflects the era's taste for architectural desserts assembled on a platter, and the recipe points the reader to a colored plate opposite.