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Cocoanut Cornstarch Mold
Add one cup of shredded cocoanut to Cornstarch Pudding No. 1, and serve with custard sauce.
A one-line variation that assumes you have the base recipe and a stirred custard sauce in hand. Everything worth knowing is in those two components.
- It depends on another recipeThe base is the book's own Cornstarch Pudding No. 1, a molded cornstarch pudding of the blancmange type. Use the book's No. 1 if you have it; a modern boxed pudding will not set firmly enough to unmold.
- CocoanutSimply the older spelling of coconut. Shredded coconut may be sweetened or plain: with sweetened flake, cut the sugar in the base by a couple of tablespoons; with unsweetened dry shred, let it hydrate in the hot pudding before molding.
- Cook the starch outCornstarch needs to reach a full boil for a minute or two to lose its raw, chalky taste and reach full thickening power. Bring it up over direct heat with constant stirring, then finish over hot water if the book directs it.
- Keep the coconut suspendedStir the shred in after the pudding has thickened and cooled for a few minutes. Added to thin hot milk it sinks, and the unmolded pudding comes out with a coconut cap at the bottom.
- The moldRinse the mold in cold water and leave it wet before filling; the film of water lets the pudding slip free. Chill at least four hours, and dip the mold briefly in warm water to release.
- Custard sauceThis is a stirred soft custard, not a baked one. Cook it until it coats a spoon, around 175-180F, and take it off the heat promptly, as it will begin to curdle not far above that.
- YieldDepends on the size of the base recipe; allow for the extra cup of coconut when choosing the mold.
Lowney's Cook Book (1907) was written by Maria Willett Howard for the Walter M. Lowney Company of Boston, a chocolate manufacturer, and like other maker-sponsored cookbooks of the period it surrounds its chocolate recipes with a full domestic repertoire. Cornstarch molds belong to the family of blancmanges that were a common feature of American dessert tables in the later nineteenth century: cheap, eggless, set in a decorative tin mold, and endlessly varied by one added ingredient, which is exactly what this entry does. Coconut had become an ordinary pantry item by then; packaged desiccated shred was sold in the United States from the mid-1890s and spared cooks cracking and grating the nut themselves. The custard sauce poured around the turned-out mold is a standard finish of the era, doing the work that whipped cream or a fruit coulis would do now.