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Farina Custard Pudding
2 quarts of milk. 7 ounces of farina. 6 ounces of sugar. 4 ounces of butter. 8 yolks, or else 5 whole eggs.
Boil the milk with the sugar in it and a pinch of salt. Sprinkle in the farina dry, beating all the while with the large egg-whip to avoid having lumps in it, as if making mush. Let the farina cook slowly half an hour or more. Farina kettles not needed when there is sugar in the mixture, and set at the back of the range. Then mix in the butter and beaten eggs. Bake in two buttered pans about 20 minutes.
A hotel-scale milk pudding built on cooked wheat cereal rather than bread or rice. Two points decide whether it succeeds: the farina must be rained in against a moving whisk, and the eggs must go into the mixture once it has cooled enough not to scramble them.
- What farina isMilled wheat endosperm, coarser than flour and finer than semolina — sold today as Cream of Wheat or plain farina in the hot-cereal aisle. Instant or one-minute versions absorb far faster and will thicken before you have finished sprinkling; use the regular kind.
- Weights, not cups7 oz farina is roughly 1 1/4 cups, 6 oz sugar about 3/4 cup plus a spoonful, 4 oz butter one stick. The book works by weight because a bakeshop does; a scale gets you much closer than volume here, since farina packs unevenly.
- The farina kettleA double boiler. The recipe says only that one is not needed when there is sugar in the mixture and the pan is set at the back of the range, the cooler end; it gives no reason, and sugar does not in itself protect milk from scorching. On a modern burner, use the lowest setting and a thick-bottomed pan, and stir often.
- LumpsSprinkle the dry grain in a thin stream with the whisk already moving. Once lumps form in a hot starch they do not whisk out. Half an hour of slow cooking is not padding — it hydrates the wheat fully, and undercooked farina stays gritty after baking.
- Adding the eggsLet the cooked farina cool to warm, not hot, before the beaten eggs go in, or beat a ladle of the hot mixture into the eggs first and return it to the pot. Straight into boiling mush and they curdle.
- Oven temperatureNone is given. A moderate oven, 350F, is right for a baked custard of this kind; a water bath is not required because the starch stabilises the eggs.
- TimingTwenty minutes suits two shallow bakery pans of moderate depth. In a deeper dish it will take considerably longer. Judge by a centre that is set with only a slight tremble, around 170-175F.
- YieldTwo quarts of milk plus the rest comes to something over five pounds of mixture, less whatever evaporates in the half-hour of cooking — two pans, twelve to sixteen servings. Halve the whole thing for a household batch.
- Yolks or whole eggsEight yolks give a richer, softer set and a yellower crumb; five whole eggs give a firmer, more sliceable pudding. Both work; choose by whether you want it spooned or cut.
The American Pastry Cook belongs to Jessup Whitehead's run of trade manuals written for hotel and restaurant kitchens in the late nineteenth century, which is why the quantities start at two quarts of milk and the instructions assume a coal range with hot and cool ends. Farina — wheat milled to a coarse granule — reached American kitchens as an inexpensive, quick-cooking alternative to whole grains, and puddings like this one sat alongside rice, tapioca and sago in the same economical family: a starch cooked soft in sweetened milk, enriched with butter and eggs, and baked just long enough to set. The branded hot cereals that made the word familiar to households were arriving in the same decades, and a cook who could turn breakfast mush into a dining-room dessert with a few eggs was doing exactly what these books were written to teach.