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Chocolate Pudding
Miss. Riley.
One quart milk, three tablespoons sugar, four tablespoons corn starch, two and a half tablespoons chocolate; scald the milk over boiling water; dissolve the corn starch in a little scalded milk, and before it thickens add the chocolate dissolved in boiling water; stir until sufficiently cooked. Use with cream, or sauce of butter and sugar stirred to a cream.
A cornstarch blancmange rather than a baked or steamed pudding: milk thickened on the stovetop, poured out, and served cold with cream. The measurements work as written, but two of the ingredients are not what a modern shopper would reach for.
- The chocolate"Two and a half tablespoons chocolate" means unsweetened block chocolate, grated or scraped from the cake — somewhere around an ounce, depending on how finely it is grated. Cocoa powder can be substituted, but the pudding will be leaner and less glossy, since the cocoa butter is what gives it richness and sheen.
- Sugar is low by modern standardsThree tablespoons for a quart of milk gives a barely sweet pudding, on the assumption that the butter-and-sugar sauce or heavy cream finishes it. If you are serving it plain, expect to double the sugar.
- Scald over boiling waterThe instruction means a double boiler, not direct heat. With cornstarch and chocolate this matters less than it does for a custard, but the gentle heat prevents the milk solids from catching and scorching, which taints the whole quart.
- Slurry, then chocolate, then heatThe hinge is the order: dissolve the cornstarch in a little of the hot milk and get the chocolate in before the mixture sets up. The recipe has you dissolve the chocolate in boiling water first, which is what lets it disperse evenly; adding it once the starch has thickened makes it far harder to work in smoothly.
- "Stir until sufficiently cooked"Cornstarch needs sustained heat to lose its raw, chalky taste and reach full thickening power. Judge by the spoon coating heavily; over a water bath this takes a good while longer than it would over direct heat.
- Setting and servingPour into a wetted mould or individual cups, press plastic wrap on the surface if you dislike a skin, and chill at least three hours. A quart of milk gives six to eight servings.
- The butter-and-sugar sauceThis is a hard sauce: butter creamed with sugar until pale, no cooking involved. Use it soft rather than chilled, so it melts against the cold pudding.
Puddings thickened with cornstarch spread through American and Canadian kitchens after commercial corn starch became widely available from the 1840s and 1850s onward, and by the time community cookbooks like The Home Cook Book were compiled in the 1870s they offered a cheaper and faster everyday alternative to the older gelatin and isinglass blancmanges, which required no simmering of calves' feet — though such recipes still appear alongside them in the same books. Chocolate at this date was commonly sold as a hard unsweetened cake to be grated or scraped, and the recipe accordingly measures it in spoonfuls and has it dissolved in boiling water first. The attribution to Miss Riley is typical of the book's method: contributions were gathered by name from local women, and the recipes carry the terseness of instructions written for someone already standing at the stove.