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Baked Corn Starch Pudding
2 quarts of milk, scant. 1/2 pound, good weight, of corn starch. 4 ounces of sugar. 3 ounces of butter. 6 yolks of eggs. 1/2 teaspoonful of salt. 1 tablespoonful of vanilla extract.
Boil the milk with the sugar in it--which prevents burning at bottom. Mix up the starch with a little cold milk and then some hot, pour it quickly into the boiling milk in the kettle and almost immediately, or as soon as fairly mixed take it off the fire. Beat in the butter immediately to cool it; then the yolks beaten up with a spoonful of milk; flavor and bake about 20 minutes or till the eggs are fairly set. The art to be learned in all sorts of corn starch puddings is to cook the starch enough so that the rawness cannot be tasted, yet not enough to cause it to turn watery. Serve with Sultana sauce. Corn Starch Meringue. New York Pudding. Oswego Pudding, Etc. Anyone who has made the nonpareil or queen pudding will understand this in a moment when told it is the same thing done in corn starch. Make the pudding of corn starch as in the foregoing receipt. When barely set in the middle spread over the top--or drop portions with a spoon--of peach marmalade or preserves. Make that hot on top and spread meringue of 8 whites whipped firm and 6 ounces of sugar over it. Bake again about 5 minutes with the oven door open. Cream sauce.
The writer has seen more partial failures, probably, with this class of puddings than with any others, and asks to be excused for dwelling upon trifling details for that reason. They are excellent when excellently made. The marmalade on top must be made cooking hot before the meringue touches it if you would avoid having an undesirable albuminous syrup overflowing the pudding, and the meringue must be only dry-baked.
There are people who like chocolate in any form three-times a day, yet the liking is far from general. The following pudding is probably as good as can be made of its class. It should only be brought on along with some other commoner sort for alternative.
A commercial-scale blancmange baked to set the yolks, written for a bakeshop rather than a household. Halve or quarter it unless you are feeding a crowd, and read the author's own warning first: the starch must be cooked past rawness but not so long that it breaks and weeps.
- YieldTwo quarts of milk gives roughly 12 to 16 servings in a large baking dish or two 9-inch dishes. Quartering the recipe (2 cups milk, 2 oz cornstarch, 1 oz sugar, 3/4 oz butter, 1 to 2 yolks, pinch of salt) works cleanly.
- Weighing the starchHalf a pound of cornstarch is roughly 1 3/4 to 2 cups by volume, but volume measurement of starch is unreliable. Use a scale.
- Oven heatNo temperature is given. A moderate oven, in the region of 350F, suits the 20-minute bake; the pudding is already thickened and only needs the yolks to set. For the meringue, gentler heat with the door propped open as directed will dry it rather than brown it.
- The hingeTake the pot off the heat the moment the starch is fairly mixed in. Cornstarch reaches full thickening power almost immediately at the boil and then begins to break down; prolonged boiling is exactly what produces the watery pudding the author warns against.
- TemperingBeating in the butter cools the mixture, which is the whole point of that step. Even so, whisk a ladle of the hot starch into the beaten yolks before returning them to the pot, or the yolks will scramble in streaks.
- Slaking"Mix up the starch with a little cold milk and then some hot" means make a smooth cold slurry first, loosen it with hot milk, and add it all at once while whisking. Dry starch tipped into boiling milk lumps instantly.
- The meringue versionEight whites to 6 ounces of sugar is a soft French meringue. The instruction to have the marmalade heated through before the whites go on is sound: a cold fruit layer sweats under meringue and the syrup runs out at the edges.
- Sultana and cream saucesBoth are named as though given elsewhere in the book. Sultana sauce is generally a sweet wine or syrup sauce with sultana raisins; a thin vanilla custard or lightly sweetened cream serves the same purpose.
Cornstarch puddings were a mid-nineteenth-century novelty that had become bakeshop routine by the time this book was written. Refined cornstarch is generally traced to the Kingsford works at Oswego, New York, in the 1840s, and "Oswego pudding" seems to have served as a general term for a starch-thickened milk pudding, which is apparently how the author uses it here. The dish is a frugal cousin of baked custard: where a custard depends on eggs to set, this one leans on cheap starch and uses six yolks mostly for richness and color. The reference to "nonpareil or queen pudding" points to queen of puddings, the English bread-crumb, jam and meringue dessert this variation copies wholesale. The closing remark about chocolate, that the liking for it is "far from general," is a useful reminder of how recently chocolate became the default sweet flavor in American kitchens.