Like many of my fellow 1960’s born children, one of my earliest cooking experiences was making a box of pudding from a box while my mother made the rest of dinner. I would pour the powdered milk and milk into a pot and stir until the mixture came to a boil. One of my first cooking from scratch experiences was making pudding from scratch. I was was a college student , working in the campus day care center. It was a really snowy winter. the kids were stuck in doors for weeks on end.
We were all doing our best to keep the kids amused despite being indoors. I came up with the idea of finger painting with pudding. I made a delicious burnt sugar pudding that we dyed with food coloring . The kids then finger painted with the pudding and made prints of their hand work onto coated paper. they talked about that activity for months.
At this point in my life, I have made pudding so often, I make it with out a recipe
.I am a big believer that after a physical or emotional trauma, a body needs sweet dairy. Yesterday, my youngest broke his bog toe. After our adventure in the ER, I made him pudding with the traditional roux. we sent him to school in a taxi today. It was a bit much managing the school day. Tonight I made pudding for dessert.
Thinking about box pudding, I decided, instead of starting with a roux, to start, like the box puddings do , combining all of the dry ingredients with the milk at the beginning of the cooking process. I mixed all of the dry ingredients, 3 T flour, 2T sugar, pinch of salt and then add the 2C milk and stir until completely mixed. The, I heated the mixture on medium –low while stirring with a wooden spoon. while I was stirring, I added cinnamon and nutmeg. and a knob of butter. As the mixture heated, the flour molecules grew. and the mixture thickened. Just as the mixture came to a plopping boil I turned off the heat, added an egg , which I mixed energetically into the pudding. Then I added a teaspoon of vanilla.
The pudding came out perfectly..and lump free.
My son was really happy to eat the pudding.
Box puddings are a big part of my history too - for something special, Mom would add some instant coffee granules to a box of chocolate, and whip some cream and fold it in -- this was "Schok Mok". All pudding were served with a blob of whipped cream on top - some members of the family always had to stir their cream in before eating the pudding.
ReplyDeleteMy mother was a big believer in adding instant coffee to anything made with chocolate. Whipped cream, was unfortunately, not a big part of my life. The combination though, sounds amazing.
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