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Caramel Cornstarch Pudding
1 tablespoon sugar 1/4 teaspoon salt 4 tablespoons cornstarch 2 tablespoons water 1 pint milk 1/2 cup caramel To prepare the caramel, melt one-half cup granulated sugar. Stir over the fire until it becomes a rather dark brown but clear color, taking care not to burn. Add one-half cup boiling water slowly, and cook until the hardened sugar is dissolved. Caramel may be bottled up, and kept indefinitely, to be used for coloring and flavoring.
Heat the milk with the caramel in a double boiler. Mix sugar, salt and cornstarch, and braid with cold water. Turn the hot milk into the cornstarch, stirring meanwhile, and return to the double boiler, and cook forty-five minutes, stirring occasionally. Turn into molds or into a large dish. Serve with whipped cream.
A plain cornstarch blancmange carrying its flavor entirely from burnt-sugar syrup, so the caramel is the whole dish. Everything else is technique.
- The hinge: how dark the caramel goesMelt the half cup of sugar dry over medium heat and take it to the color of an old penny — deep amber with a faint smell of bitterness, not black. Pulled too early it tastes only sweet; pushed past dark brown it turns acrid and no amount of milk will hide it.
- Adding water to molten sugarThe syrup is above 300F and will erupt in steam when the boiling water goes in. Add it a spoonful at a time off the heat, at arm's length, then return to a low flame to dissolve the hardened lumps. Use a deep, heavy pan, not a wide skillet.
- "Braid with cold water"Almost certainly a misprint for blend; the sense is clear either way. Stir the sugar, salt and cornstarch with the two tablespoons of cold water into a smooth slurry so it disperses without lumping.
- Forty-five minutesThat is a double-boiler figure, and it is real: over water the mixture never quite boils, so starch granules take a long time to swell and the raw floury taste to cook out. In a heavy saucepan over direct low heat the same pudding thickens in about 8 to 10 minutes once it comes to a bare simmer, with constant stirring.
- MeasurementsA pint is 2 cups of milk; the half cup of caramel is the finished syrup, not more sugar. The single tablespoon of added sugar is correct — the caramel supplies the rest, so the pudding is only lightly sweet.
- UnmoldingFour tablespoons of cornstarch to a pint sets firmly enough to turn out. Rinse the molds with cold water first, chill at least four hours, and press plastic wrap onto the surface if you dislike a skin.
- YieldFour small molds, or one 3-cup dish. Whipped cream is not optional here; the pudding is austere without it.
- Keeping the caramelThe book says the caramel may be bottled and kept indefinitely. Treat that loosely: this syrup is about half water, so it keeps far better refrigerated than standing at room temperature. Make a double batch while the pan is dirty and use it for coloring gravies and cakes.
Cornstarch puddings were the backbone of the cheap cold dessert from roughly the middle of the nineteenth century onward, a shift usually traced to the point at which commercially refined corn starch became widely available in American groceries and gave cooks a thickener that set clear and firm without eggs. That eggless quality is why this one sits in a meatless cookery book: vegetarian and Lenten cooking of the period leaned hard on grain starches and milk to produce something rich-seeming without animal flesh, and often without the expense of a custard. The caramel here does double duty as flavoring and as coloring, a practice said to have been common in nineteenth-century kitchens, where a bottle of burnt-sugar syrup might stand by the stove to darken soups and gravies as much as to sweeten puddings.