Home › Puddings and Pudding Sauces › Cornstarch Pudding
Cornstarch Pudding
13/4 Cups Milk 1/4 Cup Sugar or 1/2 Cup Corn Syrup 4 Tablespoons Cornstarch (level) Pinch of Salt Vanilla Mix the cornstarch with cold milk, scald the remaining milk, and add the sugar or syrup, salt, and cornstarch.
Stir until thick. Cover and cook for 20 minutes. Add vanilla. Serve cold, plain or with fruit. Add a square of chocolate to the milk for chocolate cornstarch.
A blancmange-style starch pudding, stiff enough to unmold. The proportions are high in starch by modern standards, which is deliberate.
- Slurry first, alwaysThe hinge is mixing the cornstarch with a portion of the cold milk before it meets anything hot. Reserve about 1/2 cup of the milk cold for this; adding dry starch to scalded milk gives lumps that no amount of stirring will fix.
- What "cook for 20 minutes" meansTwenty minutes of direct heat on a modern burner will scorch the bottom. The recipe does not specify a vessel, but a covered cook of this length was generally managed over water rather than direct flame. Once thickened, hold it over simmering water on low, covered, to cook out the raw starch taste.
- Starch quantityFour level tablespoons to 1 3/4 cups milk is roughly double what a soft, spoonable pudding needs. Expect a firm mold that will turn out of a wetted cup. For a looser pudding, 2 to 2 1/2 tablespoons is closer to current practice.
- Corn syrup optionThe 1/2 cup corn syrup alternative reflects an era when syrup was a common household sweetener and sugar was periodically dear. Expect a somewhat softer, stickier set than the sugar version.
- Vanilla, unmeasuredNo quantity is given. One teaspoon suits this volume, stirred in off the heat so the alcohol does not flash away.
- The chocolate squareA "square" of the period is one ounce of unsweetened baking chocolate. Add it to the milk being scalded and whisk smooth. Unsweetened chocolate at this sugar level tastes austere; increase the sugar by a tablespoon or two if using the sugar version.
- Skin on topLay plastic wrap or buttered paper directly on the surface as it cools, or you will get a rubbery film. Chill at least three hours before turning out.
- YieldAbout 4 small servings, or 4 half-cup molds. The recipe itself suggests serving plain or with fruit.
Cornstarch puddings filled the same slot in early twentieth-century American households that packaged pudding mixes later took over: cheap, egg-free, made from a shelf-stable box, and reliable in the hands of an inexperienced cook. Cornstarch itself was a nineteenth-century industrial product, and the starch companies promoted recipes like this one heavily on package labels and in pamphlets, which is why so many versions from this period read almost identically. The dish descends from the older European blancmange, a white molded pudding once thickened with ground almonds or isinglass; American cooks substituted cornstarch and kept the name for a while before dropping it.