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Chocolate Pudding (II)
Mrs. E. Wood.
One and a half quarts milk, boiled, one-half cake of chocolate stirred in milk, small cup of corn starch dissolved in little water, add two eggs, with one cup of sugar, a little salt. Cream for sauce.
A boiled cornstarch pudding of the plainest sort, set in a mold and served cold with cream. The instructions assume you already know how starch puddings behave, so a few things need filling in.
- The hinge: cook the starch outCornstarch must come to a full boil for a minute or two, stirring constantly, or the pudding will taste chalky and slacken as it stands. Add the dissolved starch to the boiling milk in a thin stream and keep it moving.
- Half a cake of chocolateChocolate at this date was sold in pressed cakes whose weight varied by maker, so this is genuinely ambiguous. For a quart and a half of milk, 2 to 3 oz of unsweetened baking chocolate is a reasonable modern reading, though the original may have been stronger; if you use semisweet, cut the sugar back by about a third.
- A small cup of corn starchRead this as about 3/4 cup, which should set six cups of milk firmly enough to turn out of a mold. Less gives a spoonable pudding rather than a molded one.
- The eggsTemper them: whisk the eggs with the sugar, stir in a ladleful of the hot milk, then return the mixture to the pan and cook a minute more. Added cold and direct, they will scramble in threads through the pudding.
- Setting and turning outPour into a rinsed mold or bowl and chill at least four hours. Press plastic wrap onto the surface if you dislike a skin.
- Cream for saucePlain unwhipped pouring cream, cold, sometimes sweetened and vanilla-scented. It is not a custard sauce and needs no cooking.
- YieldSix cups of milk makes a substantial pudding serving eight to ten.
The Home Cook Book (Toronto, 1877) was compiled from recipes contributed by named women of the city and sold for charity, which is why so many entries here carry an attribution like Mrs. E. Wood and so little in the way of method: the contributor was writing for neighbours who already knew how to make a boiled pudding. Cornstarch puddings of this kind were the domestic descendants of blancmange, and they spread in the second half of the nineteenth century as commercially refined corn starch became a cheap pantry staple, taking a place alongside older preparations that relied on arrowroot and ground rice. Chocolate is often said to have followed the same path: sold in hard pressed cakes to be grated or shaved into hot liquid, it is generally held to have shifted over the course of the century from a drink for the well-off to an everyday flavouring for family desserts. The recipe's confidence that a reader knows what half a cake weighs is itself a period detail.