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Boiled Farina Pudding
2 quarts of milk. 1/4 pound of sugar. 7 ounces of farina. 4 ounces of butter. 3 yolks of eggs. Salt and flavoring.
Nearly the same as corn starch pudding. Boil the milk and sugar and sprinkle in the farina dry, beating like making mush. Let cook slowly half an hour with the lid on, at the back of the range. Then add eggs and butter. Lemon, wine, vanilla, custard, or cream sauce. "Such puddings as the two last come in just right for second puddings." "What do you mean by second puddings?--they are just right for first." "But to offset the rich pudding, just as rich as it can be, the other has to be plain and of a lighter kind, such as your apple custards and fruit souffles and plain rice puddings to suit people of simpler tastes" "Not now. The fashion of having two hot puddings at once is abandoned in all the best hotels. Instead of matching your puddings, one rich and one plain, or one baked and one steamed, you now match your one hot pudding with your cold creams and custards and floats and the pastries, and some of these are rich enough to require the pudding to be as simple as the corn starch, if all are to be pleased. And don't have a brandy sauce pudding at the same time with a cold tipsy custard--give the people who abhor liquor a chance."
A hotel-scale milk pudding thickened with farina, essentially a sweetened semolina mush enriched with butter and yolks. The dialogue that follows the method is a menu-planning aside, not part of the cooking.
- FarinaFarina is milled wheat middlings, sold today as Cream of Wheat or as fine semolina. Use the quick-cooking or regular type, not instant. Coarser durum pasta semolina can be used but takes longer to soften fully.
- Weights, not cups7 ounces of farina is roughly 1 1/4 cups; 1/4 pound of sugar is a generous 1/2 cup; 4 ounces of butter is one stick. The ratio matters more than the volume, so weigh if you can.
- Sprinkle, don't dumpThe hinge of the recipe. The farina goes into boiling milk in a thin stream while you beat constantly. Added all at once it seizes into lumps that no amount of later beating will break up.
- "The back of the range"A coal range was coolest at the back, so this means the lowest possible heat with the lid on. On a modern burner use the smallest ring on low, or set the pan in a water bath, and stir every few minutes to keep the bottom from scorching.
- Half an hour is not a mistakeModern farina packages say two to three minutes. The long slow cook here is for texture, not doneness: it swells the grain fully and removes any raw starch taste in a pudding that is meant to be spooned, not poured.
- Eggs and butter lastTake the pan off the heat before the yolks go in, and beat them in quickly with a little of the hot pudding first if you want insurance against scrambling. The residual heat of two quarts of hot mush will set them; return it to low heat for a minute or two if it seems slack.
- FlavoringThe original leaves this open. Lemon zest, vanilla, or a grating of nutmeg all suit it; the sauce choices listed, including a wine sauce, are served over it rather than stirred in.
- YieldTwo quarts of milk makes a commercial quantity, twelve generous servings or more. Halving or quartering works without adjustment.
The American Pastry Cook belongs to Jessup Whitehead's series of trade manuals written for hotel and restaurant kitchens in the American Midwest in the late nineteenth century, and its habit of breaking into shop-floor dialogue is characteristic of him: the recipes are for the cook, the arguments are for the steward. Farina puddings sat in the plainest rank of the hotel repertoire, the same family as corn starch, tapioca, sago and rice puddings, all cheap milk-and-starch dishes that could be made in gallon quantities and dressed up with whatever sauce the day called for. The exchange printed here has one of the speakers assert a shift in American hotel service, away from sending out two hot puddings at once, one rich and one plain, toward a single hot pudding balanced against the cold creams and pastries on the same bill of fare, that being the speaker's own claim rather than independent evidence of such a change. The closing warning about brandy sauce and tipsy custard is offered as a way, in the text's words, to give the people who abhor liquor a chance.