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Blanc-Mange
Dissolve three heaping table-spoons corn starch and three of sugar in one pint of milk; add to this three eggs well beaten, and pour the mixture into one pint of boiling milk, stirring constantly until it boils again; just before taking from the stove flavor to suit the taste and pour into cups or small molds; when cool take out and place on a glass dish with a mold of jelly in the center. Serve a spoon of jelly and a sauce of sweetened cream with each mold. Or, put one quart milk (reserving three table-spoons with which mix three heaping table-spoons corn-starch) with a pinch of salt and five table-spoons sugar. When milk is hot, pour in the mixed cornstarch, and stir until it is a thick batter; pour this on the wellbeaten whites of four eggs, add two tea-spoons vanilla, pour into molds wet in cold water, and set on ice; when cold, turn from the mold, and serve in a custard made as follows: Put one pint milk in a basin over boiling water, mix in a tea cup two even tea-spoons corn-starch in two of cold milk, beat in the four yolks of eggs and two and a half table-spoons of sugar. When the milk is hot pour part of it into the cup and stir well, pour it back into the basin and stir until as thick as desired; put on ice until chilled thoroughly. Blanc-mange may be colored green with spinage juice, or pink with the juice of strawberry, currant or cranberry, or a handsome yellow with the grated peel of an orange or lemon, moistened with the juice and strained through a cloth. Very pretty half-pint molds may be made as follows: Tilt the mold in a pan of snow or pounded ice, color one-fourth the blanc-mange pink, another fourth green; wet the molds and pour into them a little of the colored blancmange, putting only one color into each mold and filling it so that when tilted the blanc-mange reaches nearly to the top and covers about two-thirds of the bottom; when cold set mold level, and fill with the white blanc-mange, which has, meantime, been kept in so warm a place as not to harden. If the molds are made to imitate roses or fruit, the fruit may be green, and roses pink; if corn, yellow; and various ways of combining colors and forms will suggest themselves to the ingenious housewife.
Two blanc-manges here: a plain cornstarch custard set in cups, and a whiter one bound with beaten egg whites and served in a pouring custard. Both are easy, and both depend on cooking the starch out fully before it goes into the molds.
- Heaping tablespoonsA heaping tablespoon of cornstarch is usually reckoned at about 1.5 level tablespoons, so three heaping spoons is roughly 4 to 4.5 level tablespoons, somewhere around 30 to 35 g. For a quart of milk that is a firm, sliceable set; reduce by a spoonful if you want it just barely standing.
- Cook the starch outOnce the mixture returns to a boil, keep it moving for a full minute or two. Cornstarch loses its raw, chalky taste and reaches full thickening power only after it has actually boiled; pulling it early gives a pudding that tastes floury and weeps in the mold.
- The yolk sauce must not boilThe second custard, thickened with yolks over boiling water, should be taken off between 175 and 180F, when it coats a spoon. It contains a little cornstarch, which gives some insurance, but a hard boil will still curdle it.
- Tempering"Pour part of it into the cup and stir well, pour it back" is tempering, and it is not optional. Adding the hot milk all at once to cold yolks scrambles them.
- Set on iceRead this as the refrigerator: four hours for half-pint molds, overnight for a quart mold. "A pan of snow or pounded ice" for the tilted layered molds can be a roasting tin of ice water in the freezer or fridge.
- UnmoldingThe recipe directs wetting the molds in cold water before filling (in the second version and for the layered molds), which helps the pudding release. If it sticks, dip the mold to the rim in hot water for five seconds and invert onto a wet plate, which lets you slide the pudding into position.
- ColoringsSpinach juice, strawberry, currant and cranberry juice all work but must be added off the heat and sparingly, since the extra liquid softens the set. Modern natural food colorings do the same job without thinning the mixture.
- YieldThe first version makes about a quart, six to eight cup molds. The second makes a quart of blanc-mange plus a pint of pouring custard, enough for eight.
Blanc-manger is medieval French for "white food," and the original was a savory-sweet dish of pounded chicken or fish with almonds, rice and sugar, served white on purpose at a time when a pale dish signaled refinement and expense. By the eighteenth century the meat had dropped away and the set came from isinglass, calf's-foot gelatin or ground almonds; the version in Buckeye Cookery shows the next stage, in which cheap manufactured cornstarch, widely available in American groceries after the middle of the nineteenth century, replaced all of it. That substitution may well be why this recipe sits among the creams and custards rather than the jellies, and it would explain why so much of the text is given over to color and molding: with the flavor reduced to milk, sugar and vanilla, the dish had to earn its place on the table by looking well. Molds shaped as roses, ears of corn and fruit are often said to have been common tinware in Victorian kitchens, and the instruction to tilt a mold in pounded ice for a two-tone effect is the kind of parlor showmanship a competent housewife was expected to manage without a confectioner.