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Flavoring (Ed peaches apricots or pears)
ed peaches, apricots, or pears Scald milk, stir in blended corn-starch, and cook five minutes in double boiler. Place upper part double boiler over fire, let corn-starch boil, return boiler to place, add sugar, egg, and salt beaten together, and cook two minutes, stirring constantly. Flavor with vanilla, add fruit, and pour into mold.
Chill, and serve with sugar and cream. An excellent way of using up small amounts of canned fruits.
A cornstarch mold — what most nineteenth-century books call a blancmange — stretched with whatever canned fruit is left in the jar. The page as printed begins mid-sentence, so the ingredient list is lost; what follows is method and proportion.
- The missing ingredientsThe title line has been cut off, so no quantities survive. A workable proportion for a cornstarch mold of this type is 1 pint milk, 3 to 4 tablespoons cornstarch, 1/4 cup sugar, 1 egg and a pinch of salt, with about a cup of drained fruit; treat that as a reconstruction rather than the author's own figures.
- Blending the cornstarch"Blended corn-starch" means the starch slaked smooth in a little cold milk before it meets the hot. Dumped dry into scalded milk it lumps immediately and no amount of stirring recovers it.
- Why the pan comes off the heatThe instruction to lift the upper pan directly over the flame is the hinge. Cornstarch does not reach full thickening power until it actually boils, and a double boiler alone often will not carry it there. Give it a genuine boil for a few seconds, stirring hard, then return it to the water bath.
- The egg goes in lastSugar, egg and salt are beaten together and added after the starch has boiled, then cooked only two minutes. Longer and the egg curdles into the set starch; the two-minute limit is deliberate.
- Drain the fruitCanned peaches, apricots or pears carry a great deal of syrup, and that liquid will thin the mold and keep it from turning out cleanly. Drain well and cut into pieces no larger than a half inch, then fold in off the heat so the fruit does not break down.
- The moldRinse the mold in cold water and leave it wet — the film of water is what lets the set pudding slide out. A 1-quart mold, or six individual cups, suits the proportions above.
- Chilling"Chill" means at least four hours, and overnight is better. Press plastic wrap onto the surface or a skin will form. To unmold, dip the outside briefly in warm water and invert.
- YieldAbout four to six servings, depending on whether it is turned out whole or set in cups. The recipe calls for sugar and cream at table, and the pudding itself is only lightly sweetened.
Cornstarch molds of this kind are generally said to have become a fixture of American home cooking from around the middle of the nineteenth century, when commercially refined cornstarch became cheap and was often marketed as a genteel substitute for the arrowroot and isinglass blancmanges of earlier English cookery. They were valued precisely for their blandness: a neutral, milky base that could carry vanilla, chocolate, coffee, or — as here — the tag ends of a jar of canned fruit. That last use explains its place in a book of left-overs. A pudding that absorbed a cupful at a time without complaint was doing real work. The phrase "an excellent way of using up small amounts" is the whole editorial argument of the genre in a single line.