Home › Recipes › Corn Starch Chocolate Pudding
Corn Starch Chocolate Pudding
2 quarts of milk. 3 ounces of grated chocolate. 3/4 pound of sugar. 5 ounces of corn starch. 1 ounce of butter. 6 or 7 eggs. Pinch of salt. 1 tablespoonful of vanilla extract.
Boil the milk with both the sugar and chocolate in it. Beat frequently till the chocolate is all dissolved. Mix the starch as usual and stir it in, then immediately remove from the fire. Beat in the butter, eggs and vanilla, and bake about 20 minutes, or till just set in the middle. Serve warm with butter sauce or golden sauce, or cold with sweetened cream. The foregoing makes a very fine appearing pudding when meringued over like the one preceeding it.
A big bakery-scale custard-starch pudding: two quarts of milk will fill a 3-quart dish and serve twelve or more. The original assumes a professional who knows how to slake starch and read an oven, so a few blanks need filling.
- The hinge: temper the eggsThe starch mixture comes off the fire near boiling, and six or seven eggs beaten straight in will scramble at the edges. Whisk a ladleful of the hot base into the beaten eggs first, then return that to the pot off the heat, working quickly.
- "Mix the starch as usual"That means slaking it: stir the 5 oz of corn starch smooth into a cup or two of cold milk reserved from the two quarts, then pour it into the boiling milk while whisking. Dry starch dropped into hot liquid seizes into lumps that never disperse.
- Oven temperatureNone is given, and the recipe names no oven at all; a moderate oven, around 350F, is a reasonable modern reading. At that heat the recipe's 20 minutes will set a shallow dish; a deep 3-quart dish is likely to want longer, and it is done when the centre barely trembles.
- The chocolateIn this period "grated chocolate" generally means unsweetened baking chocolate, which is why three-quarters of a pound of sugar is in the pot. Modern semisweet or chips will make it cloying unless you cut the sugar by roughly a third.
- Weights to volume3 oz chocolate is three squares of standard baking chocolate; 3/4 lb sugar is about 1 3/4 cups; 5 oz corn starch is about 1 1/4 cups; 1 oz butter is 2 tablespoons.
- ScorchingMilk, sugar and chocolate boiled together catch on the bottom fast. Use a heavy-bottomed pan, keep the heat moderate, and scrape the corners of the pan with the whisk rather than just stirring the middle.
- The saucesButter sauce and golden sauce are period dessert sauces of creamed butter and sugar, the golden one enriched with egg yolk and sometimes a little wine or spirit. Sweetened cream, as the text allows, is the easier finish.
- Meringuing it overIf you take the option, whip the whites of three or four eggs with a couple of tablespoons of sugar each, spread over the hot baked pudding and return it to the oven until the peaks colour, five to eight minutes.
This belongs to the era when corn starch was still new enough to build recipes around. Commercial corn starch was manufactured in the United States from the middle of the nineteenth century. The weights rather than cups, the two-quart scale, and the shorthand that presumes the reader already knows what "mix the starch as usual" involves all point to a book written for trade rather than household cooks. The pudding itself sits between two older forms: the boiled blancmange thickened by starch alone, and the baked custard set by eggs. Using both gives a dessert that holds its shape on a plate and takes a meringue.