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Corn-Starch Pudding
One pint sweet milk, whites of three eggs, two table-spoons cornstarch, three of sugar, and a little salt. Put the milk in a pan or small bucket, set in a kettle of hot water on the stove, and when it reaches the boiling point add the sugar, then the starch dissolved in a little cold milk, and lastly the whites of eggs whipped to a stiff froth; beat it, and let cook a few minutes, then pour into tea. cups, filling about half full, and set in cool place. For sauce, make a boiled custard as follows: Bring to boiling point one pint of milk, add three table-spoons sugar, then the beaten yolks thinned by adding one table-spoon milk, stirring all the time till it thickens; flavor with two tea-spoons lemon or two of vanilla, and set to cool. In serving, put one of the molds in a sauce-dish for each person, and pour over it some of the boiled custard. Or the pudding may be made in one large mold.
To make a chocolate pudding, flavor the above pudding with vanilla, remove two-thirds of it, and add half a cake of chocolate softened, mashed, and dissolved in a little milk. Put a layer of half the white pudding into the mold, then the chocolate, then the rest of the white; or two layers of chocolate may be used with a white between; or the center may be cocoa (made by adding half a cocoa-nut grated fine), and the outside chocolate; or pine-apple chopped fine (if first cooked in a little water, the latter makes a nice dressing), or strawberries may be used. - Mrs. D. Buxton.
A cornstarch blancmange with a stirred custard sauce — two thin puddings that between them use up a whole egg. The hinge is heat control: the pudding wants a double boiler and the sauce must never boil.
- The improvised double boiler"A pan or small bucket set in a kettle of hot water" is a bain-marie; use a metal bowl or the top of a double boiler over simmering water. Milk heated this way comes up to a scald and stops short of a hard rolling boil, which is the point — direct heat scorches milk and cornstarch on the bottom of the pan.
- Cornstarch quantityTwo tablespoons to a pint of milk gives a soft, spoonable set rather than a firm turn-out mold. If you intend to unmold it whole, use three tablespoons. Slake it in a few tablespoons of cold milk first, as directed, or it will lump.
- Cook the starch out"A few minutes" means at least three to five after it thickens. Undercooked cornstarch tastes chalky and can thin back down as it cools.
- The custard sauce"Bring to boiling point" applies to the plain milk only. Once the yolks go in, hold it at 170–180F and pull it the moment it coats a spoon; boiling curdles it. Straining it into the cooling bowl catches any threads of set egg.
- Half a cake of chocolateNineteenth-century baking chocolate was sold unsweetened in cakes, but cake sizes varied a good deal, so the quantity here cannot be pinned down; an ounce or two of unsweetened chocolate for two-thirds of the batch is a reasonable reading. Taste and add sugar, since the base pudding carries only three tablespoons.
- Cocoa-nut"Cocoa" here is coconut, not cocoa powder — half a fresh nut grated fine, which comes to something like a cup and a half. Unsweetened desiccated coconut, soaked briefly in warm milk, stands in for it.
- Chilling and yieldA pint of milk fills four to six teacups half full. Allow at least three hours in the refrigerator, longer for a single large mold; the layered chocolate version needs each layer set enough to hold a line before the next goes on.
- Fruit versionsFresh pineapple contains bromelain, a protease that will wreck any gelatin nearby; cooking it, which the recipe suggests anyway, disables the enzyme. Canned pineapple is already cooked.
Cornstarch puddings are a common feature of American community cookbooks of the 1870s and 1880s, and they are essentially the old almond-milk blancmange rebuilt around an industrial product: corn starch was manufactured on a large scale in the United States from the 1840s onward and marketed hard to housewives as a cheap, reliable thickener that needed no isinglass, no calf's foot and no arrowroot from the tropics. The economy of the pair of recipes here is the real period signal he whyites go into the pudding, the yolks into the sauce, so nothing is wasted and one pudding yields both a mold and its dressing. The elaborate list of variations at the end, layering chocolate against white, tucking grated coconut into the center, is the sort of thing a hostess did to make a plain dessert of milk, eggs, starch and sugar look like confectionery. The Dixie Cook Book carries a large body of unsigned material drawn from its Buckeye Cookery parent alongside signed contributions; this recipe is one of the contributed ones, signed by the woman who sent it in.