Home › Our Susan's Opinion of a Kitchen › Kiss Pudding
Kiss Pudding
Mrs. C, Belford.
One quart of milk, three tablespoons of corn starch, yolks of four eggs, half cup sugar, and a little salt; put part of the milk, salt, and sugar on the stove and let it boil; dissolve the corn starch in the rest of the milk; stir into the milk, and while boiling add the yolks. Flavour with vanilla.
FROSTING.-Whites of four eggs beaten to a stiff froth, half a cup of sugar; flavour with lemon, spread it on the pudding, and put it into the oven to brown, saving a little of the frosting to moisten the top; then put on grated cocoanut to give it the appearance of snow flake.
A cornstarch blancmange under a baked meringue, in the style of a hundred nineteenth-century "kiss" puddings. The method is sound; only the oven and a few proportions need translating.
- Temper the yolksThe instruction to "add the yolks" while the milk is boiling will scramble them if they go in straight from the shell. Whisk a ladle of the hot thickened milk into the beaten yolks first, return the mixture to the pan, and cook a minute more over low heat without letting it return to a hard boil.
- Cornstarch quantityThree tablespoons to a quart is a soft, spoonable set rather than a moulded pudding. If you want it firm enough to turn out, go to five tablespoons; as written it belongs in the dish it was baked in.
- Oven for the meringueThe book assumes you will judge the oven by hand. Use 350F for about 12-15 minutes, until the peaks are tan and the meringue is set through. A hotter oven browns the tips before the interior cooks.
- Meringue sugarHalf a cup of sugar to four whites works out to about two tablespoons per white, right in line with modern meringue practice. Beat the whites to soft peaks and add the sugar gradually rather than all at once, or the froth will slacken.
- "Saving a little of the frosting to moisten the top"This is the trick that makes the coconut adhere. Reserve a couple of spoonfuls of unbaked meringue, dab it over the browned surface after it comes out, and scatter the coconut onto the tacky patches.
- CocoanutIn this period grated coconut often meant fresh coconut taken to the grater, though prepared dried coconut was also sold by then. Either way, modern sweetened flake is much sweeter and coarser; unsweetened shredded coconut is the closer match.
- Yield and servingA quart of milk makes six to eight servings. Serve it barely warm or chilled; the meringue weeps if it sits refrigerated overnight, so it is best eaten the day it is made.
"Kiss pudding" is often said to take its name from the meringue on top: a kiss, in nineteenth-century American and British baking, was a small blob of sweetened beaten egg white dried in a cool oven, the ancestor of the meringue cookie. Spread over a cornstarch custard rather than piped in drops, the same froth turned a plain nursery pudding into something fit for company, and the grated coconut "to give it the appearance of snow flake" is the finishing flourish that justifies the effort. The dish belongs to the moment when cornstarch, sold commercially in North America from the mid-century onward, replaced older thickeners like arrowroot and rice flour in household cooking, and it is typical of The Home Cook Book, a Toronto community collection whose recipes were contributed and signed by named subscribers such as Mrs. C. of Belford.