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Date Surprise
1 tablespoon butter 3 tablespoons sugar 1 quart milk 4 tablespoons cornstarch 1 cup chopped dates 1 teaspoon almond extract 1/2 teaspoon vanilla Heat the milk and sugar in a double boiler. Mix the cornstarch in cold milk, and stir in the hot milk. Cook twenty minutes. Add chopped dates. Remove from the heat, and add almond and vanilla extract. Serve with whipped cream with a seeded date on top.
A cornstarch blancmange, thickened in a double boiler and studded with dates. The ingredient list and the method do not quite agree, so read both before you start.
- The orphaned butterA tablespoon of butter heads the list and is never mentioned again. Add it with the milk and sugar; it enriches the pudding slightly and does no harm.
- Cold milk for the slurryThe recipe calls for a quart of milk, then asks you to mix the cornstarch in cold milk without allotting any. Hold back about half a cup of the quart, slake the cornstarch in it, and heat the rest.
- Set strengthFour tablespoons of cornstarch to a quart gives a soft, spoonable pudding rather than a sliceable mould. If you want to turn it out of a form, use six.
- Twenty minutes is not a mistakeCornstarch thickens within a minute or two of reaching a simmer, but the long double-boiler cook is what drives off the raw starch taste. Stir often and keep the water below the pan at a bare simmer.
- Add the dates off the boilThey soften and bleed sugar quickly. Stirring them into the hot pudding and then removing it from the heat, as written, is right; longer cooking turns them to threads.
- Extracts lastAlmond and vanilla are volatile. The instruction to add them after the pan leaves the heat is the one step worth obeying exactly.
- Almond extract strengthA full teaspoon in a quart of pudding is assertive to modern taste. Half a teaspoon is closer to what most palates now expect; start low and add more if you want it.
- Skin on topPress plastic wrap or buttered paper directly onto the surface while it chills, or you will get a rubbery film.
- YieldAbout six to eight servings. Chill at least three hours; overnight is better.
Cornstarch puddings like this one belonged to the large family of nineteenth- and early twentieth-century blancmanges — milk set with starch rather than the almond-milk jellies, often set with isinglass, that the name earlier described. They were cheap, needed no eggs, and could be made in quantity, which is why they are common in the cold-dessert chapters of period cookbooks. Dates, imported dried from North Africa and the Middle East and available in American groceries by the early twentieth century, were a familiar sweetener and textural interest in such books; the almond extract may be read as an echo of the blancmange's almond ancestry, and the "surprise" is presumably no more than the fruit hidden in a plain white pudding.