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Chocolate Jelly
2 squares chocolate. 1 tablespoonful Crisco 2 cupfuls boiling water 3/4 cupful sugar 4 tablespoonfuls cornstarch 1/4 teaspoonful salt 1 teaspoonful vanilla extract ½ cupful chopped walnut meats Whipped cream Break chocolate into small pieces, dissolve in boiling water, add Crisco, salt, cornstarch mixed with sugar, stir and boil for eight minutes. Remove from fire add vanilla and nuts and pour at once into wet mold. Cool, turn out and serve with whipped cream.
A cornstarch-set chocolate mold of the sort that filled the pudding chapter of every early twentieth-century cookbook. The ingredient list as printed has a gap, so read the method first.
- The missing chocolateThe instructions begin "break chocolate into small pieces" but no quantity appears in the list — a typesetting omission. Comparable molded chocolate cornstarch puddings of the period use 2 ounces (2 squares) of unsweetened chocolate against 2 cups liquid; the original gives no figure, so treat any amount as a reconstruction rather than the author's.
- CriscoStill sold as an all-vegetable shortening, though reformulated in the 2000s to reduce trans fat, so it is not identical to the partially hydrogenated cottonseed product of the book's day. A tablespoon here is doing the job butter would do, adding richness and gloss. Butter substitutes directly if you would rather.
- "Dissolve in boiling water"Chocolate does not dissolve; it melts and disperses. Work it into a little of the hot water to a smooth paste before adding the rest, or the finished jelly will be speckled.
- Boil for eight minutesThis is the hinge. Cornstarch needs a real boil to lose its raw taste and reach full setting strength, but eight minutes over direct heat will scorch on the bottom unless you stir constantly with a flat-ended spoon or spatula. Low heat, unbroken stirring.
- Wet moldRinsing the mold in cold water and leaving it wet is what allows the set pudding to slide out. Do not grease it. A 1-quart mold or bowl is the right size; chill at least four hours before turning out.
- The nutsA cup and a half of chopped walnuts in a quart of pudding is a great deal by modern taste, and depending on how thick the mixture is when poured they may settle unevenly. Half that amount gives a better texture, or reserve some for scattering over the turned-out mold.
- YieldAbout a quart, serving six to eight. It is very sweet on its own; the whipped cream the recipe calls for is worth treating as part of the dish rather than as decoration, and is best left unsweetened.
The Story of Crisco was Procter & Gamble's promotional cookbook for the hydrogenated cottonseed shortening it introduced in 1911, and it worked by inserting its product into dishes cooks already knew. This is one of those dishes. "Jelly" here does not mean gelatin — it is often taken in an older, broader sense of a turned-out mold that holds its shape, though period usage more often attached the word to gelatin- or isinglass-set preparations — and the setting agent is cornstarch, which had become cheap and reliable in American kitchens through the second half of the nineteenth century. Molded cornstarch puddings, variously called blancmange, cornstarch mold or jelly, were standard nursery and family fare, and adding a tablespoon of Crisco to one was less about cooking than about establishing the habit of reaching for the can.