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Fruit Cornstarch Pudding
Add one cup of any kind of cooked fruit to Cornstarch Pudding No. 1 just before molding.
A one-line variation that assumes you have the book's base pudding in front of you. Everything that can go wrong here happens at the moment the fruit meets the hot starch.
- The base puddingCornstarch Pudding No. 1 is not reproduced here. In books of this era a No. 1 cornstarch pudding is typically milk thickened with cornstarch, sweetened and lightly flavored, and firm enough to unmold at roughly 4 tablespoons cornstarch to a pint of milk, with 2 to 3 giving a softer spooning pudding. Use whatever the book's own No. 1 specifies rather than guessing.
- "Just before molding" is the hingeFold the fruit in off the heat, after the starch has fully thickened and cooked out its raw taste. Stirring fruit into a pudding that is still cooking gives it time to break the starch down and can leave you with a slack set.
- Acid fruit thins cornstarchCooked rhubarb, sour cherries, plums and pineapple all carry enough acid to cut starch gel if held hot. Adding them at the end limits the damage; if the fruit is very tart, expect a softer set and use a shallow mold.
- Drain the fruitOne cup of cooked fruit can carry several tablespoons of syrup, which is loose liquid the starch has not accounted for. Drain it well and pat down anything very wet, or the unmolded pudding will weep.
- Molding and unmoldingRinse the mold with cold water and do not grease it. Chill at least 4 hours, then dip the mold briefly in warm water and invert. Individual cups unmold far more reliably than one large form when fruit is suspended in the pudding.
- Skin on topPress plastic wrap or dampened parchment directly onto the surface before chilling. Otherwise the exposed starch dries into a rubbery film that shows as a seam once turned out.
- YieldIf the base is built on a pint of milk, that plus a cup of fruit serves about 4 to 6, depending on whether you mold it in one form or in cups; scale to whatever quantity the book's No. 1 actually makes.
Molded cornstarch puddings were the workhorse dessert of American household cookery from the 1860s through the First World War: cheap, made from shelf staples, and set without gelatin or eggs. Cornstarch had been manufactured in quantity in the United States since the mid-nineteenth century, and the packages carried recipes for exactly this sort of blancmange. Lowney's Cook Book (Maria Willett Howard, published for the Walter M. Lowney chocolate company in 1907) follows the same pattern, and this entry is a thrifty one: a way to fold last night's stewed fruit into tonight's dessert.