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Butterscotch Pudding
(Especially good for children) 3/4 cup Karo, Blue Label 2¼ cups milk 1/3 teaspoon salt 5 tablespoons Argo or Kingsford's Cornstarch 6 drops vanilla 1/2 tablespoon butter Scald the Karo and milk. Add butter, salt and cornstarch dissolved in an equal quantity of cold milk. Cook in a double boiler, stirring constantly until thickened, allowing twenty minutes. Add vanilla, chill, mould, and serve with sweetened cream.
A moulded cornstarch pudding from a corn-products promotional book, stiff enough to turn out of a form. A few of its measures and brand names need translating.
- Karo, Blue LabelKaro was sold in several labels in this period; Blue Label was one of the lighter syrups rather than the dark Red Label, while the colourless syrup was sold separately as Crystal White. Ordinary light corn syrup is the direct substitute, and 3/4 cup is the whole of the sweetening.
- It is not butterscotch as we mean itThere is no brown sugar and no caramelised sugar here, so the flavour is mild vanilla-corn syrup, not the deep butterscotch of a brown-sugar pudding. The name may owe more to the pale gold colour and the butter than to the taste.
- Argo or Kingsford'sBoth were cornstarch brands owned by the same company that made Karo, which is why they are named. Any plain cornstarch works, and British cornflour is the same thing; never substitute wheat flour at the same measure.
- "An equal quantity of cold milk"This means about 5 tablespoons of extra cold milk to slurry the 5 tablespoons of cornstarch, added on top of the 2 1/4 cups already scalded. Mix it smooth before it goes in or the pudding will be lumpy.
- Why so much starchFive tablespoons of starch to something over three cups of liquid, counting the syrup as well as the milk, gives a set firm enough to turn out of a mould, which is what the recipe intends. Spooned into glasses instead, it would be on the firm side.
- Scalding and the double boilerScald means bringing the milk to about 180F, just to a shiver at the edges, not a rolling boil. The twenty minutes over water is not padding: cornstarch thickens quickly but needs sustained heat to cook out its raw, chalky taste, and the double boiler keeps the milk from catching.
- Small measuresOne-third teaspoon of salt is a generous quarter teaspoon, which suits most palates. Six drops of vanilla is a very small amount, well under a quarter teaspoon, added off the heat so the flavour is not driven off.
- Moulding and yieldRinse the mould or cups with cold water and do not dry them, which helps the pudding release cleanly after several hours chilled. The quantities make roughly four to six servings.
This comes from one of the recipe booklets issued by the Corn Products Refining Company, the maker of Karo syrup and of both Argo and Kingsford's cornstarch, which explains why all three brands appear by name in a four-line recipe. Books of this kind were given away or sold for a few cents through the 1910s and 1920s, and their real work was to persuade cooks that corn syrup belonged in the pantry alongside sugar, a case made all the harder by the pure-food controversies of the era over glucose. The parenthetical "especially good for children" is doing that argument in miniature. The dish itself sits in the long line of moulded cornstarch puddings descended from blancmange, which were popular household desserts precisely because they needed no eggs, no oven and no great skill, only patience at the double boiler.