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Cherry Blanc-mange
Put 1 quart of milk into a saucepan, add 1 tablespoon Crisco. Mix 1 cup cornstarch smoothly with 1/2 cup cold milk; when the milk boils stir in cornstarch and stir for 10 minutes, then add 2 tablespoons sugar and 1 teaspoon vanilla. Stew 2 cups cherries until tender in 1/2 cup water, add 2 tablespoons sugar. Rinse out a mold with cold water, arrange a few cherries in the bottom, then put in some blanc-mange, then rest of cherries mixed with cornstarch. Turn out when firm. Serve with milk.
A cornstarch mold rather than a custard, despite its placement in the egg chapter — there is no egg in it. Two things need attention: the starch is measured very heavily, and the sugar barely at all.
- The cornstarch is the hingeOne cup of cornstarch to a quart of milk gives a stiff, sliceable pudding that will stand up out of a mold — that is the point of it. Around 1/2 cup per quart is closer to modern practice and gives a softer set that will usually still turn out, though less crisply.
- SugarTwo tablespoons in a quart of milk reads as almost unsweetened to a modern palate. Most cooks will want 1/3 to 1/2 cup, especially with sour cherries. Add it to the milk before the starch goes in.
- Stirring for 10 minutesCornstarch reaches full thickness within two or three minutes of the boil. The extra time is there to cook out the raw starch taste, which is real, but keep the pan at a bare simmer and stir constantly — prolonged hard boiling breaks starch gel down and the pudding will loosen instead of setting.
- CriscoThis book was published to promote Crisco, hence the tablespoon of shortening in a milk pudding. Butter does the same job of enriching the mixture and tastes better; it can also simply be left out.
- CherriesThe stewed cherries assume fresh sour cherries, pitted, which cook tender in a few minutes. Frozen sour cherries work directly. Sweet cherries need less sugar and hold their shape longer.
- "Rest of cherries mixed with cornstarch"Read this as the rest of the cherries mixed with the remaining blanc-mange, not with dry starch. Drain them well first or the layer will weep and the mold will not release.
- Setting and unmoldingChill at least 4 hours, and refrigerate rather than leave in a cool room as the original assumes. Dip the mold briefly in warm water and invert onto a wet plate so you can slide the pudding into position.
- Yield and servingWith the starch and the cherries this comes to close to two quarts; use a mold of that capacity. It serves six to eight. "Serve with milk" means cold milk poured around the base at table; cream is the richer option.
Blanc-mange comes from the Old French for "white eating," and in medieval kitchens it meant a pale dish of pounded almonds with capon or fish, thickened with rice or the almonds themselves; by the early modern period versions set with isinglass or calf's-foot jelly were common. By the nineteenth century the almonds and the animal gelatine had largely given way to arrowroot, Irish moss, or — once cheap boxed cornstarch reached American grocers from the 1840s onward — cornstarch, which is what this version uses. That shift is why a dish with a French name and no eggs in it ends up under "Eggs" in a household calendar: blanc-mange had become the everyday cousin of the molded custard. A Calendar of Dinners itself was a Procter & Gamble publication written to find uses for Crisco, introduced in 1911, which accounts for the otherwise unnecessary tablespoon of shortening stirred into the milk.