Home › Left-Over Fruit › Corn-starch Pudding
Corn-starch Pudding
1 egg, well beaten 4 tablespoonfuls corn- 1 teaspoonful salt starch, blended in½ cup chopped cooklittle cold water + cup sugar
The scan of this page has collapsed two columns of an ingredient list into one line, so the text as printed is incomplete rather than wrong. What survives is a standard blancmange-style cornstarch pudding, and the gaps are worth naming before anything else.
- The text is damagedThe list runs the left and right columns together, and at least one quantity — most likely the milk, the liquid a cornstarch pudding of this era is built on — is missing entirely. The fragment "½ cup chopped cook-" most probably continues as "chopped cooked fruit," though the page as scanned does not confirm it. Do not try to reconstruct proportions from the line as it stands.
- What a cornstarch pudding of this period isTwo to four tablespoons of cornstarch to a pint of milk, sweetened, salted, thickened over heat, then finished with a beaten egg. Four tablespoons to a pint gives a pudding firm enough to unmould; less gives a spoonable cream.
- The salt is a misprint or an outlierA full teaspoon of salt in a single pint of sweet pudding is far more than the period norm, which is a pinch to a quarter-teaspoon. Treat the figure as suspect.
- Blending the starchThe instruction to blend the cornstarch in a little cold water is the one direction that survives intact, and it is the hinge. Starch dumped dry into hot milk seizes into lumps that no amount of beating will smooth.
- The eggBeaten egg goes in off the heat or over very low heat, after the starch has thickened. Boiled hard it curdles and the pudding turns grainy.
- The fruitCooked left-over fruit — stewed apple, pears, plums, canned peaches — is folded in at the end, once the pudding has cooled somewhat. Added hot and early, juicy fruit thins the set and acid fruit can slacken the starch.
- YieldThe milk quantity is lost, so no yield can be given for this recipe as printed; a pudding built on a pint of milk would serve about four in small moulds or cups.
Cornstarch puddings belong to the great age of commercial starch, roughly the 1850s onward, when boxed corn starch became a cheap pantry staple in American homes and took over from older thickeners and setting agents such as arrowroot, rice flour and isinglass for everyday sweets. They were prized precisely because they were bland and accommodating: a neutral white base that could carry whatever a household had on hand — which is why a pudding of this kind was a natural vehicle for left-over cooked fruit. Books that treated economy as a domestic virtue and a housekeeping skill were published in quantity between roughly 1890 and 1920, and a pudding that could absorb yesterday's stewed apples without announcing itself was exactly the sort of thing they existed to teach.