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Cocoanut Molds with Chocolate Sauce
2 cups milk 1 cup powdered sugar 3 tablespoons cornstarch mixed with 3 tablespoons cold milk teaspoon salt cup shredded cocoanut 3 egg whites Mix cornstarch with three tablespoons cold milk; add salt, sugar and two cups milk. Cook in double boiler twenty minutes, stirring constantly. Add cocoanut and cut and fold in the whites of eggs, beaten until stiff. Turn into molds, chill, and serve with chocolate sauce. 1 cup milk
A cornstarch blancmange in the American style, thickened in a double boiler and lightened with beaten whites. Two of the original fractions were lost in printing, and the stray "1 cup milk" at the end is the opening line of the chocolate sauce recipe that followed, not part of the mold.
- The missing fractions"teaspoon salt" and "cup shredded cocoanut" appear to have lost their fractions in the setting of the type. Similar puddings of the period commonly call for about 1/4 teaspoon salt and something on the order of half to three-quarters of a cup of coconut; a full teaspoon of salt would be far too much for 2 cups of milk.
- Powdered sugarIn American books of this era "powdered sugar" usually means a fine-grained white sugar, not the cornstarch-cut confectioners' sugar sold today. Ordinary granulated sugar dissolves perfectly well here; if you use confectioners', the pudding will set slightly firmer from the extra starch.
- CocoanutDried coconut of this period was generally unsweetened, either freshly grated or sold as "shredded cocoanut." Use unsweetened desiccated or shredded coconut. Sweetened bagged flake will push an already sweet pudding over the edge.
- The twenty minutes matterCornstarch needs sustained heat to lose its raw taste and reach full thickening power, and a double boiler is unlikely to get hot enough to scorch it. Stir constantly and give it the full twenty minutes; the mixture should coat a spoon heavily before the coconut goes in.
- Folding the whitesFold the stiff whites into the hot pudding off the heat and work quickly and lightly — overworking deflates them and you lose the texture the recipe is built on. The whites are only partly cooked by residual heat, so use pasteurized whites if you are serving anyone for whom raw egg is a concern.
- Molds and unmoldingRinse individual molds or teacups with cold water before filling; the film of moisture releases the pudding cleanly. Chill at least three hours, and longer is better — an underchilled mold slumps as soon as it is turned out.
- The sauceThe trailing "1 cup milk" almost certainly belongs to the chocolate sauce recipe printed with or after this one. Any thin cooked chocolate sauce serves; make it while the molds chill and cool it to warm or room temperature so it does not melt the surface.
- YieldAbout 4 cups of pudding — six small molds, or four generous ones.
Lowney's Cook Book was compiled by Maria Willett Howard and issued in 1907 by the Walter M. Lowney Company, a Boston chocolate and cocoa manufacturer; like Baker's and Hershey's promotional books of the same decade, it exists in large part to put the firm's cocoa and chocolate into as many household desserts as possible, which is why an otherwise plain coconut blancmange arrives with a chocolate sauce attached. The mold itself belongs to the long line of cornstarch puddings that came to stand alongside, and often to replace, the older gelatin-, isinglass- and Irish-moss-set blancmanges in American kitchens after cheap boxed cornstarch became a grocery staple in the second half of the nineteenth century. Shredded coconut had by then become an ordinary pantry item rather than a luxury, sold dried in packets, and it turns up throughout period dessert chapters in cakes, pies and molds of exactly this kind.