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Chocolate Blanc Mange
One quart milk, one half box gelatine soaked in one cup water; four tablespoons grated chocolate, rubbed smooth in a little milk; three eggs, vanilla to taste. Heat the milk until boiling, then add the other ingredients; boil five minutes and pour into cups or moulds. Serve cold with sugar and cream.
A gelatine-set chocolate custard from the era when packaged gelatine was still sold by the box. Two things need attention: how much gelatine half a box actually was, and the instruction to boil an egg mixture for five minutes.
- Do not boil it for five minutesThree eggs in a quart of near-boiling milk will scramble if held at a rolling boil. Temper the beaten eggs with hot milk first, then cook over low heat, stirring, until the mixture coats a spoon at about 175F, and take it off. Prolonged boiling also weakens gelatine's setting power.
- Half a box of gelatineNineteenth-century boxes generally held about an ounce of granulated gelatine, sometimes divided into packets, so half a box is roughly half an ounce. That works out to two modern quarter-ounce envelopes, which is the standard amount for setting a quart of liquid. Box sizes were not uniform, so the original figure is genuinely approximate.
- Soak, then dissolveThe cup of cold water is a bloom, not a cooking liquid. Let the granules stand in it until swollen and translucent, then stir it into the hot milk off the heat so it dissolves clear.
- Grated chocolateThis means a block of plain unsweetened or barely sweetened chocolate grated on a rasp, not cocoa powder and not modern eating chocolate. Four tablespoons grated is roughly 1 to 1½ ounces; if you use cocoa powder instead, use about three tablespoons and expect a thinner body.
- No sugar in the puddingThe pudding itself contains no sugar; sugar and cream go on at the table. If you would rather sweeten it, two to four tablespoons stirred into the milk is in keeping without making it a modern dessert.
- Moulding and unmouldingRinse the cups or mould with cold water before filling so the blanc mange releases. It needs at least four hours in the refrigerator, and overnight is better.
- Strain before settingPour the finished mixture through a fine sieve into the moulds. That catches any cooked egg and any gelatine that failed to dissolve, both of which show badly in a pale set pudding.
- YieldA quart of milk plus the soaking water fills six to eight small cups.
Blanc mange takes its name from the French blanc manger, "white food" of of almond milk or pounded chicken thickened with rice flour or isinglass, and white by definition. By the time this recipe was written the name had loosened to mean almost any moulded milk pudding, which is how a chocolate one could be called blanc mange without anyone objecting. The shift owes a good deal to commercially packaged granulated gelatine, sold by the box in the later nineteenth century: it replaced the long labour of boiling down calves' feet or shredding isinglass, and put moulded desserts within reach of a household cook working alone. The recipe offers cups as well as an elaborate mould.