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Cornstarch Pudding
1 pint milk 2 tablespoons cornstarch 3 tablespoons sugar 1/2 teaspoon vanilla Dissolve the cornstarch in a little cold water. Stir the sugar into the milk, and place it on the fire. When it begins to boil, add the dissolved cornstarch. Stir constantly for a few minutes. After it becomes of the right consistency it can be left to cook for half an hour, to do away entirely with the raw taste resulting from too little cooking. When thoroughly cooked, remove from fire, add the vanilla, and turn into a mold. Serve with fruit sauce or thick cream.
A plain milk pudding set with cornstarch alone, no eggs. It is easy to make and easy to scorch, so the vessel matters more than anything else in the method.
- The half-hour cookCornstarch thickens in two or three minutes but tastes chalky and raw until it has cooked out. Thirty minutes over direct heat will catch and burn on the bottom; set the pan in a double boiler, or over the barest simmer with frequent stirring, once the pudding has thickened. A shorter spell in a double boiler may be enough for the raw taste to go, but the recipe's half hour will do no harm.
- QuantitiesA pint is 2 cups of milk. Two tablespoons of cornstarch to a pint gives a soft pudding that will just hold a shape; for a mold that turns out cleanly and stands up, use 3 tablespoons.
- Slurry"A little cold water" means about 2 tablespoons, enough to make a pourable cream with no lumps. Stir it again immediately before adding, since cornstarch settles hard in the bottom of the cup within a minute.
- Add the saltThe recipe has none. A pinch of salt in the milk sharpens both the dairy and the vanilla; without it a cornstarch pudding tastes flat.
- Vanilla off the heatFollowing the instruction as written is worth doing deliberately: alcohol-based extract loses some of its aroma if it goes in while the pan is on the fire.
- The moldRinse the mold with cold water and leave it wet before filling. The film of water lets the set pudding drop out. Press plastic wrap or buttered paper onto the surface if you dislike the skin that forms as it cools.
- Chilling and yieldIt needs at least 3 hours in the refrigerator to set firm enough to unmold, and it is better overnight. This makes about 2 cups, which is four modest servings.
- Serving"Fruit sauce" here most likely means crushed sweetened berries or a thin stewed-fruit purée rather than a jelly glaze, though the recipe does not say. The pudding is barely sweet by modern standards and depends on the sauce.
Cornstarch pudding is the American descendant of blancmange, a set white dish that had earlier been thickened with almonds, isinglass or arrowroot. Commercially refined cornstarch became a cheap household staple in the United States in the second half of the nineteenth century, and starch manufacturers promoted pudding recipes in their packaging and pamphlets, which is one reason near-identical versions appear in so many books of the era. Such a pudding sits easily in a meatless cookbook: it is a filling dessert built entirely from milk, sugar and starch, with no eggs to buy and no gelatin, which at the time was an animal product.