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Chocolate Pudding
Put a pint and a half of milk to boil. Have four tablespoonfuls of scraped chocolate in a saucepan with two tablespoonfuls of boiling water and four of sugar, when the paste is smooth and glossy pour it in the milk. Mix four tablespoonfuls of cornstarch with half a pint of milk and one teaspoonful of salt; pour this in the boiling milk and stir for a few minutes. Pour the mixture in a fancy mould and let it remain for three-quarters of an hour.
A cornstarch blancmange rather than a baked pudding — the whole thing is thickened on the stovetop and set in a mould. Two details in the original need attention: the salt, and the setting time.
- The measures in cupsA pint and a half of milk is 3 cups, and the half pint mixed with the cornstarch is another cup, for 4 cups of milk in all. Four tablespoons of cornstarch to a quart of milk is on the light side for a moulded pudding; expect a soft set, and add another tablespoon or two if you want it to hold sharp fluting.
- Scraped chocolateThis means unsweetened block chocolate shaved with a knife, not cocoa powder and not modern chips. Four tablespoons of shavings is loosely packed and imprecise; figure on about 1 to 1½ ounces by weight. Chopped 100% baking chocolate is the closest equivalent.
- The salt is a misprint's worthA full teaspoon of salt in a sweet pudding of this size will taste distinctly salty. A quarter teaspoon is the modern proportion, and given only four tablespoons of sugar for four cups of milk, the sugar wants raising rather than the salt.
- Cook the starch properly"Stir for a few minutes" is the hinge. The mixture must come back to a full boil and bubble for a good minute or two after the cornstarch goes in, or it will taste chalky and slump when turned out. Stir constantly and scrape the corners of the pan.
- Three-quarters of an hour is not enoughThe recipe gives no chilling instruction beyond leaving the pudding in the mould for three-quarters of an hour. Chill in the refrigerator for at least three hours, and cover the surface with plastic wrap pressed to the pudding if you dislike skin.
- Preparing the mouldRinse the mould with cold water and leave it wet, or brush it very lightly with a neutral oil. A fancy fluted mould releases best if the outside is dipped in hot water for a few seconds before inverting.
- YieldAbout a quart of pudding — six modest servings from a mould, or four generous ones in individual cups.
This is the plainest kind of pudding: a blancmange, a name generally traced to medieval European cookery, where the dish took rather different forms, long since reduced to milk stiffened with starch and flavoured. Cornstarch became a household staple in America after commercial manufacture took hold in the mid-nineteenth century, and by 1896 a hotel could rely on it to give a dessert that set reliably, unmoulded cleanly, and cost almost nothing per portion — useful qualities in a kitchen feeding hundreds. The instruction to melt the chocolate to a smooth paste with boiling water before it meets the milk is the detail that still earns its keep: block chocolate scraped straight into hot milk tends to seize into gritty flecks.