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Semolina Mold
2 ounces semolina 1 ounce sugar 1 pint milk 1/2 lemon 1/2 teaspoon vanilla Rinse a saucepan with cold water, then put in the milk and sugar. When it boils, add the semolina slowly, stirring all the time. Cook for three-quarters of an hour, then add the flavoring. Then rinse out a mold with cold water, pour the mixture in, and let it stand until cold.
A starch-set milk pudding of the plainest kind, and it succeeds or fails on two things: how you handle the semolina going into the milk, and how patiently you cook it out. A few of the original's instructions look eccentric but are doing real work.
- Weights to volume2 ounces semolina is about 1/3 cup; 1 ounce sugar is 2 tablespoons. A pint is 2 cups if the book is American, 20 fl oz if the edition is British — either works, the British pint simply gives a softer set.
- Why rinse the panA film of cold water on the pan wall slows the milk from catching and scorching in the first minute of heating. It is a genuine dairy-cook's habit, not superstition, and worth keeping.
- Adding the grainRain the semolina onto boiling milk in a thin stream while stirring, or it seizes into lumps that will not disperse later. Once it is in, drop the heat immediately — milk starch scorches fast.
- The three-quarters of an hourModern semolina is milled finer and swells within 10 to 15 minutes over low heat. The long cook may have suited a coarser meal; if you follow it, use a heat diffuser or a double boiler and stir often, or you will reduce the milk and taste the bottom of the pan.
- The half lemonThis most likely means the rind rather than the juice. Pare it in strips, infuse it in the milk as it heats, and fish it out before the semolina goes in. Lemon juice added to hot milk risks curdling it.
- Rinsing the moldThe film of water stops the pudding gripping the metal, so it releases cleanly. Do not dry the mold, and do not grease it — fat leaves a dull, greasy skin on the turned-out surface.
- Setting and unmoldingCover the surface with a disc of parchment while it cools or it forms a tough skin. Chill several hours; dip the mold briefly in hot water before turning out. At this ratio the set is delicate, so use a shallow mold rather than a tall one.
- Yield and servingServes three to four. It is deliberately bland and expects a companion — stewed fruit, raspberry jam thinned with water, or a spoonful of cream.
Semolina is the coarse durum wheat middlings left after fine flour is sifted off, and in nineteenth- and early twentieth-century Britain and America it belonged to the same nursery-and-invalid family of milk puddings as rice, sago, tapioca and arrowroot: cheap, filling, easily digested, and requiring nothing but a pan and a slow fire. A molded pudding gave a cook something that could be turned out whole and brought to table with the dignity of a proper dessert course. The cold mold, set only by cooked starch rather than gelatin, is the humblest version of the shaped dishes that dominated Victorian dessert tables.