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OAT-MEAL BLANC-MANGE
A delicious blanc-mange is made by stirring two heaping table-spoons of oat-meal into a little cold water, then stir with a quart of boiling milk, flavor and pour into molds to cool, when cream or jelly may be eaten with it.
A sickroom pudding built on oatmeal rather than the usual arrowroot or isinglass. It works, but the original assumes a coarser meal and a longer cooking time than the wording suggests.
- What "oat-meal" meantIn 1877 this is ground oats "" pinhead or fine oatmeal, the kind sold for porridge, not rolled flakes. Fine (sometimes sold as "superfine") oatmeal gives the smooth set a blanc-mange wants; rolled oats stay visibly flaky and the mold will look like cold porridge.
- It has to actually cookThe recipe reads as though stirring the slurry into boiling milk is enough. It is not. Keep it at a bare simmer, stirring, for 20 to 30 minutes until the meal has swollen and the mixture coats a spoon heavily; undercooked oatmeal tastes raw and chalky, which is the whole failing of this dish when it goes wrong.
- The proportions are thinTwo heaping tablespoons of meal to a quart of milk will thicken but rarely sets firm enough to turn out of a mold. For something that unmolds cleanly, closer to 3/4 cup of fine oatmeal to the quart is realistic. Poured into cups and served as a soft pudding, the original ratio is fine.
- Cold water first, and whySlaking the meal in a little cold water before it meets hot milk is the one step that prevents lumps. Add the slurry to the milk in a slow stream while stirring, never the reverse.
- "Flavor"The book leaves this open. Period-appropriate choices: grated nutmeg, a strip of lemon peel steeped in the milk, a little cinnamon, rose water, or vanilla. Sugar is not mentioned and would have been added to taste, if at all.
- The moldsRinse them with cold water and leave them wet, or brush very lightly with a neutral oil; the pudding then slides out. Chill at least 4 hours, and overnight is better for a firm turn-out.
- Yield and servingA quart of milk makes roughly eight half-cup servings. Serve cold with pouring cream, or with a spoonful of jelly as the text suggests -- red currant or quince work well, and the acidity keeps it from tasting flat.
Blanc-mange began as a medieval dish of pounded almonds and capon thickened to a pale, quivering mass, and by the nineteenth century the name had come to mean almost any white pudding set in a mold, whether with isinglass, arrowroot, cornstarch or Irish moss. Placing an oatmeal version in the "Food For The Sick" chapter reflects a Victorian conviction that oats were both nourishing and gentle, suitable for invalids who could manage nothing rich; oatmeal gruel and oatmeal water were standard sickroom fare on both sides of the Atlantic. Buckeye Cookery came out of Ohio church-community cookbook circles in 1877, and its invalid recipes share a common logic -- few ingredients, mild flavoring, and a form that can be eaten cold with a spoon by someone sitting up in bed.