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Chocolate Pudding
Reserve one gill of milk from a quart, and put remainder on the fire in a double-boiler. Mix 3 tbsp. cornstarch with the cold milk. Beat two eggs with the half cup of powdered sugar and 1/2 tsp. salt. Add this to the cornstarch and milk, and stir into the boiling milk, beating well for a minute. Shave fine two squares chocolate, and put it into a small pan with 4 tbsp. sugar and 2 of boiling water. Stir over a hot fire, until smooth, then beat into the hot pudding. Cook in all, ten minutes, counting from the time the eggs and cornstarch are added. Serve cold with whipped cream.
— Mrs. Howard Manning
A cornstarch-and-egg blancmange darkened with unsweetened chocolate, from the era when a double boiler was standard equipment on every range. The measurements translate cleanly; the one thing worth watching is whether the starch ever gets hot enough to set.
- A gillHalf a cup. Reserve that from the quart of milk to slake the cornstarch, and scald the remaining 3 1/2 cups.
- Powdered sugarIn American books of this period "powdered sugar" usually means fine granulated sugar, not the cornstarch-laced confectioners' sugar sold under that name today. Use granulated; the pudding already has all the starch it needs.
- Squares of chocolateOne square is one ounce of unsweetened baking chocolate, so two squares is 2 oz. Not semisweet — the recipe supplies its own sugar, half a cup in the custard and four tablespoons more in the chocolate paste.
- The hinge: real heat on the starchCornstarch does not thicken fully until it approaches a boil, and a double boiler holds its contents below a true boil. Keep the water at a hard simmer so the pudding actually bubbles sluggishly at the surface, and hold it there the full ten minutes; otherwise it stays soupy and tastes of raw starch.
- TemperingAdding the eggs -- The eggs and cornstarch go into the hot milk rather than hot milk into the eggs, the reverse of the usual tempering, so pour them in a thin stream while beating rather than all at once. Strain the finished pudding if any threads of set egg appear.
- Ten minutes, counted correctlyThe clock starts when the eggs and cornstarch go in, not when the chocolate does. Beat the chocolate paste in near the end, leaving a couple of minutes of the ten for it to smooth out.
- CoolingPress plastic wrap or buttered paper directly on the surface before chilling, or the pudding forms a tough skin. Give it several hours cold to set.
- YieldA quart of milk with two eggs gives roughly eight to ten half-cup servings. The whipped cream is not optional in spirit — unsweetened chocolate at this ratio is fairly austere.
Cornstarch puddings like this one belong to the second half of the nineteenth century, when commercially milled corn starch became cheap and manufacturers printed recipes on the box to show it could replace the older rice, arrowroot and isinglass thickeners. The chocolate here is handled the old way: unsweetened cake chocolate shaved fine and worked into a paste with sugar and boiling water before it meets the milk, a step belonging to the period before smooth, easily dispersed cocoa powders became the ordinary way to flavour a pudding. Philathea cook books were fundraising collections compiled by the Philathea classes — adult women's Bible-study groups organized within the Baraca-Philathea movement that spread through American Protestant Sunday schools from the 1890s onward — and like most community books they credit each contributor by her married name, which is why this pudding travels under Mrs. Howard Manning rather than her own.