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Chocolate Pudding
2 tablespoons cornstarch 1 pint milk 2 tablespoons grated chocolate 1/2 cup sugar Dissolve the cornstarch in a little cold milk or water and add it to the pint of milk which has just been brought to a boil. Add the sugar and chocolate; boil until the mixture thickens; pour into wet molds and set aside to cool. At serving time turn from molds and serve with whipped cream or boiled custard sauce.
A cornstarch blancmange rather than a baked or steamed pudding, and it depends entirely on how you handle the starch and the chocolate. A few notes bring it in line with current practice.
- The hinge: cook the starch outTwo tablespoons cornstarch to a pint of milk sets firmly enough to unmold, but only if the mixture comes to a real boil and holds it for a minute or two, stirring constantly. Pulled off early it tastes chalky and slumps on the plate.
- "Grated chocolate"This would have meant an unsweetened block, so use 2 tablespoons finely grated or chopped unsweetened chocolate, roughly 1 ounce. Modern semisweet chips will work but push the pudding sweet, so cut the sugar to about 1/3 cup.
- MeasuresA pint is 2 cups; 1/2 cup sugar is a scant 100 g. The "little cold milk" for slurrying the starch is about 1/4 cup; the recipe treats it as extra liquid (or water), though it is easier to take it from the pint.
- Lump insuranceCornstarch slurried cold and poured into boiling milk can still seize. Add it in a thin stream while whisking hard, or whisk the starch with the sugar and a little cold milk first, which keeps the granules separated.
- Wet moldsRinsing the molds in cold water and leaving them damp is what lets the pudding release; it is still the best method. Small cups or ramekins unmold more reliably than one large mold.
- Chilling"Set aside to cool" meant a cool larder. Refrigerate, and press plastic wrap directly on the surface if you dislike the skin that forms. It needs at least three hours to set enough to turn out.
- YieldA pint of milk gives four modest servings. The boiled custard sauce suggested as an accompaniment is a thin stirred custard, not a pouring cream.
Puddings thickened with cornstarch rather than eggs or breadcrumbs spread quickly through American cookbooks after the middle of the nineteenth century, when commercially refined cornstarch became a cheap pantry staple and manufacturers pushed it with printed recipe pamphlets. The result belongs to the old family of blancmanges — milk stiffened with starch or gelatin, turned from a decorative mold — but it was generally reckoned cheaper than a custard and required no oven. The chocolate here is grated from a block because that was the usual household form: pre-sweetened eating chocolate existed but was a confection, while baking chocolate came as a hard bitter cake to be shaved or scraped as needed.