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Corn Starch Jelly
One quart boiling water; wet five tablespoons corn starch, ono teacup sugar, a pinch of salt, with cold water, and one teaspoon lemon or vanilla extract for flavouring; stir the mixture into the boiling water, boil five minutes, stir all the while; pour into cups previously dipped in cold water. This quantity will fill six or seven cups. If wished richer, milk may be used instead of water. Good for invalids.
A plain cornstarch blancmange, set in cups rather than a mould. It needs no adaptation beyond a few translations of measure and one point of technique.
- The hinge: slurry firstThe cornstarch, sugar and salt must be slaked with cold water to a smooth cream before they meet the boiling water. Cornstarch dropped dry into hot liquid seizes into lumps that no amount of stirring will disperse.
- TeacupA nineteenth-century teacup in American recipe books is often reckoned at about three-quarters of a modern cup, though the term was never standardised and some books treat it as a full cup. That works out at roughly six fluid ounces of sugar to a quart of liquid, which is on the sweet side; start lower if you prefer.
- Boil five minutesThis is not padding. Cornstarch thickens well before it is cooked out, and an undercooked pudding tastes chalky and can thin again as it stands. Keep it at a slow bubble, stirring constantly, until the raw starch flavour is gone.
- Extract at the endVanilla and lemon extracts are alcohol-based and lose much of their aroma over five minutes of boiling. Stir the flavouring in off the heat instead, once the pan is pulled.
- Cups dipped in cold waterThe film of water is a release agent. Rinse the moulds and leave them wet rather than drying them, and the set jelly will slip out cleanly onto a plate.
- Milk versionMade with whole milk this becomes a proper blancmange, richer and softer set. Milk scorches where water does not, so use a heavy pan, keep the heat moderate and stir into the corners.
- Yield and settingSix or seven small cups, as stated; figure four to six servings. Allow at least three hours in the refrigerator, and cover the surface if you dislike the skin that forms.
- ServingThe original names no accompaniment. Cold cream, a fruit sauce, or stewed fruit is usual; on its own it is very plain indeed.
Cornstarch was a comparatively new convenience, commercially manufactured in the United States from the 1840s onward and marketed hard to households as a cheaper, more reliable thickener than arrowroot. Recipes like this one show it displacing the older blancmanges set with calf's-foot jelly or ground almonds: the same shape and the same wet-mould trick, but no gelatine and no long simmering of bones, and a mixture that could be brought together quickly on the stove before being left to set. The closing line, "Good for invalids," places it squarely in the tradition of sickroom cookery that was a common feature of domestic manuals of the period, where the ideal was food that was bland, smooth, easily swallowed and thought to be undemanding on the digestion. Flavoured with a spoonful of extract and set in a teacup, it was as much a nurse's recipe as a cook's.