Home › Dessert › Fancy Chocolate Blanc Mange
Fancy Chocolate Blanc Mange
Two-thirds of a quart of milk, one cup sugar, one-half cup grated chocolate, three tablespoons corn starch, vanilla to taste. Mix the corn starch with one-third quart of milk, stir in the whites of three eggs well beaten, add the sugar, after it has boiled pretty thick, flavor with vanilla; then take one-third of it out, and place it where it will keep warm, take the remainder, add the beaten yolks and the chocolate, beat them up nicely together, wet a mould or a brick shaped pan and first put a dark layer in, then a light one, then the dark one. Serve with either whipped cream or sweetened cream.
A layered cornstarch pudding of the sort that filled the dessert chapter of every late-nineteenth-century household book. The method as printed is compressed and slightly out of order, so read it through before starting.
- The quantities in cupsTwo-thirds of a quart is about 2⅔ cups of milk, and the one-third quart used to slake the cornstarch is about 1⅓ cups. In other words, roughly half the milk goes to the cornstarch slurry and the rest is scalded first — the recipe never says so outright, but the pudding will not thicken smoothly otherwise.
- Grated chocolateThis means a plain unsweetened or barely sweetened block chocolate, grated on a coarse rasp; half a cup grated is about 2 ounces. Modern unsweetened baking chocolate is the closest match. Cocoa powder is not a substitute at this volume, and chocolate chips will not disperse.
- Order of workScald the plain milk, whisk in the cornstarch slurry, and cook, stirring constantly, until it is thick and no longer tastes of raw starch — a good two to three minutes at a bare boil. Cornstarch must reach boiling to set, and undercooked starch is the usual reason a blanc mange slumps.
- The whitesThe beaten whites are what lighten the pale layer. As printed they are stirred into the cold milk-and-cornstarch mixture before it is boiled; if you instead add them to an already-thickened base, do it off direct heat and stir briskly, or they may set in threads rather than blending.
- The yolksTemper them — stir a ladle of the hot pudding into the beaten yolks first, then return the mixture to the pan and bring it back just to a simmer with the chocolate. Straight yolks into a boiling pan will scramble.
- Wetting the mouldRinsing the mould with cold water and leaving it wet is the period trick for turning the pudding out cleanly; it works. A 1-quart loaf pan or pudding mould is the right size.
- Layering and settingLet each layer firm at the surface, five to ten minutes, before adding the next, or the dark and light will bleed together. Chill at least four hours, and preferably overnight, before unmoulding.
- YieldAbout a quart, serving six. Sweetened cream means cream stirred with a spoonful of sugar and poured round the base, not whipped.
Blanc mange — literally "white eating" in French — began in medieval Europe as a pale dish of pounded almonds thickened with rice or shredded capon breast, and by the eighteenth century had settled into a sweet almond-milk jelly set with isinglass or calf's-foot gelatine. The nineteenth century made it a household staple by swapping in cheaper thickeners: Irish moss, arrowroot, and above all cornstarch, which was manufactured on an industrial scale in the United States from the 1840s onward and marketed hard to home cooks. Chocolate blanc mange is a late variation. The word "fancy" here does the work it usually does in these books: it signals the extra step of dividing the batch and building it in stripes, so a plain nursery dessert arrives at table looking like something from a confectioner's window.