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Raspberry Blanc-Mange
Stew nice fresh raspberries, strain off the juice and sweeten it to taste, place over the fire, and when it boils stir in corn starch wet in cold water, allowing two table-spoons of corn starch for each pint of juice; continue stirring until sufficiently cooked, pour into molds wet in cold water and set away to cool; eat with cream and sugar. Other fruit can be used instead of raspberries. - Mrs. J. P. Rea, Minneapolis, Minn.
A fruit-juice starch pudding of the plainest kind, and it stands or falls on the ratio of cornstarch to juice and on cooking the starch out fully.
- The hinge: cook the starch out"Continue stirring until sufficiently cooked" means at least a minute or two at a full bubble after the mixture thickens. Undercooked cornstarch tastes chalky and the set will weep as it cools.
- Slurry, not spoonfuls"Wet in cold water" means a slurry: stir the cornstarch into two or three tablespoons of cold water per pint until smooth, then pour it into the boiling juice in a thin stream while whisking. Dry starch dropped into hot liquid lumps instantly.
- Set strengthTwo tablespoons per pint gives a soft mold that will just hold its shape when turned out. For a firmer unmolding, three tablespoons per pint is closer to modern practice; for a spoonable pudding served in glasses, keep to two.
- YieldA pint of juice needs roughly 1 1/2 to 2 lb of raspberries, and fills four small molds or serves four.
- Wetting the moldsRinsing the molds in cold water and leaving them wet is what lets the blanc-mange release. It works as well now as it did then; a very light film of neutral oil is the modern equivalent.
- SweeteningSweeten before boiling, not after, and taste the juice cold if you can — warm liquid reads sweeter than it will eat. Raspberry juice usually takes somewhere between 1/3 and 2/3 cup sugar per pint depending on the fruit.
- StrainingPush the stewed fruit through a fine sieve rather than a colander to keep out seeds, then strain a second time through cloth if you want the finished pudding clear rather than cloudy.
- Other fruitCurrants, blackberries and sour cherries all behave the same way. Fresh pineapple and kiwi juice contain enzymes that prevent gelatine setting unless the juice is boiled first, which this method does anyway; cornstarch is unaffected by them.
Blanc-mange began as a medieval dish of pounded almonds, capon and rice — the name is simply French for "white food" — and by the nineteenth century it had drifted to mean any molded, milk-or-juice pudding stiffened with a thickener. In American cookbooks of the 1870s and 80s the thickener is variously isinglass, gelatine, Irish moss, arrowroot or, increasingly, cornstarch, which had become cheap and reliably available after commercial production expanded in the middle of the century. A fruit blanc-mange like this one dispenses with the milk altogether, which makes it a warm-weather dish and a thrifty one: it uses the juice of berries at their glut, needs no ice, and turns a pint of juice, pressed from a pound and a half to two pounds of fruit, into four servings. Buckeye Cookery collected such recipes from named contributors across the Midwest, and Mrs. Rea's recipe carries the line "other fruit can be used instead."