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Coffee Irish Moss Blanc Mange
Use recipe for Irish Moss Blanc Mange, and flavor with two teaspoons coffee extract. 2 cups milk Cornstarch Pudding No. I 4 tablespoons cornstarch 3 tablespoons sugar 3 egg whites ½ teaspoon vanilla Mix cornstarch and sugar; scald milk, add to cornstarch, stir constantly, until it thickens; cook one half hour, stirring occasionally. Add the beaten egg whites, beat well, flavor, and mold. Chill and serve.
Cornstarch Pudding No. 2 Follow recipe for Cornstarch Pudding No. 1, substituting three egg yolks for three egg whites.
Three related molded puddings run together on one page: a coffee-flavored variant of the book's Irish moss blancmange, and two cornstarch puddings that differ only in whether whites or yolks go in. The notes below cover what the terse text assumes you already know.
- The base recipe is elsewhereThe coffee version gives no method because it depends on the book's Irish Moss Blanc Mange, a recipe of the usual type in which dried carrageen is soaked and cooked in milk and the liquid strained, the seaweed's own carrageenan setting the pudding. Without that recipe in hand, the first line here is unusable on its own.
- Irish mossSold today as dried carrageen or Irish moss, usually in health-food shops rather than groceries. It must be rinsed of sand and grit and picked over before soaking.
- Coffee extractThis meant a concentrated coffee essence, either bought bottled or made by reducing very strong brewed coffee. Two teaspoons of modern coffee extract, or roughly a teaspoon of instant espresso powder dissolved in a little hot water, is in the same range of strength.
- Cook it over waterHalf an hour of direct heat will scorch a cornstarch pudding and leave it tasting of burnt milk. Use a double boiler, or the lowest possible flame with a heavy pan and frequent stirring.
- Why so longCornstarch thickens in two or three minutes but tastes raw and chalky. The long cook is there to drive off that starchy flavor, not to thicken further, so do not cut it short.
- The egg whitesBeat them stiff and fold them into the pudding while it is still hot off the heat, then return it briefly to the double boiler so the eggs set. Beating them in vigorously, as written, knocks out the lightness that is the point of the white version.
- The yolk versionYolks curdle where whites forgive. Temper them with a few spoonfuls of the hot pudding before they go into the pan, and keep the mixture below a simmer once they are in.
- MoldingRinse the mold in cold water and leave it wet before filling; the film of water lets the set pudding drop out cleanly. Chill until firmly set.
- YieldTwo cups of milk plus the sugar, starch and eggs makes rather more than a pint, so use a mold with room to spare; it serves four modestly. Four tablespoons of cornstarch to two cups of milk is a firm, sliceable set rather than a spoonable pudding.
Irish moss is carrageen, a red seaweed gathered off the north Atlantic coasts; the name is conventionally traced to Ireland, where it was long harvested, though that derivation is traditional rather than documented. By the nineteenth century it was also raked and dried commercially in New England, particularly around Scituate on the Massachusetts coast, which is why it turns up so readily in Boston-area cookbooks. Boiled in milk it releases carrageenan, and the strained liquid sets on chilling with no gelatin, no eggs and no starch. It was also pressed on invalids as a strengthening food, a reputation carrageen carried well into the twentieth century. The cornstarch puddings sitting beside it on this page represent the newer industrial alternative: refined cornstarch, widely available and cheap after the mid-1800s, did the same molding job with none of the rinsing and picking over that seaweed demanded. Lowney's, a Boston chocolate manufacturer, issued this book as a promotional volume, and its dessert chapter reads like a survey of every setting agent a housekeeper of the day might reach for.