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Cornstarch Pudding
Pour two quarts of milk into a saucepan, adding six ounces of sugar, boil, and stir in seven or eight ounces of cornstarch, adding only a small quantity at a time. Cook gradually over the fire for about half an hour, then put in four ounces of butter and the whole of five eggs, or the yolks of eight. Turn the mixture into a dish or mould, and bake in a moderate oven until done. Turn it out, pour sweet sauce of some kind over, and serve.
A restaurant-scale moulded cornstarch pudding, closer to a baked blancmange than to the soft stovetop pudding the name suggests today. The proportions are the thing to understand before you start.
- Weigh the cornstarchSeven to eight ounces is roughly 1½ to 1¾ cups by volume — a very high ratio to two quarts of milk, and deliberately so, since the pudding has to hold its shape when turned out of a mould. If you want a spoonable pudding rather than a sliceable one, halve it.
- Slurry, don't sprinkle"Adding only a small quantity at a time" is the hinge. Cornstarch dropped into boiling milk seizes into lumps instantly. Slake it in a cup or two of the cold milk first, then whisk that into the hot milk in a thin stream.
- The half hour is not paddingStarch that thick needs long, gentle cooking to hydrate fully and lose its chalky raw taste. Use a heavy pan, a flat wooden spatula rather than a whisk once it stiffens, and keep scraping the bottom — at this thickness it scorches readily.
- Temper the eggsFive whole eggs or eight yolks going straight into a near-boiling starch paste will scramble. Beat them, stir in a ladle or two of the hot mixture, then return the lot to the pan off the heat.
- Moderate ovenRoughly 325–350°F. Butter the mould generously and stand it in a pan of hot water; the custard sets more evenly and the outside will not develop a rubbery skin. Reckon 45 minutes to an hour for a large mould, until the centre is just set.
- Cool before unmouldingThe recipe says turn it out, but do it warm and it will slump. Let it cool at least 30 minutes — chilled is safer still — then run a knife round and invert.
- Sweet sauceA thin vanilla or lemon custard sauce, a wine sauce, or stewed fruit purée would all suit. Anything thin and pourable works; the pudding itself is bland and firm and needs the contrast.
- YieldTwo quarts of milk makes a great deal — 12 to 16 servings. Quarter the recipe for a household.
Cornstarch reached American kitchens in commercial quantity from the 1840s onward, and by the 1890s the boxed product was cheap, shelf-stable and heavily promoted with recipe leaflets — which is why puddings like this one turn up in hotel kitchens as well as farmhouses. Oscar Tschirky's version belongs to the older European tradition of moulded farinaceous puddings, where the starch does the work that gelatine or eggs alone once did; the technique is essentially that of a blancmange, stiffened further and set in the oven so it can be turned out whole and sauced at the table. The scale — two quarts of milk, five eggs — is a reminder that The Cook Book by "Oscar" of the Waldorf was compiled from working hotel notes, where a single dish fed a dining room rather than a family.