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BLANCMANGE (another way)
Dissolve in a saucepan, over a gentle fire, two ounces of the best isinglass in two pints of new milk. Add the rind of a lemon and a pint of cream; boil for a quarter of an hour and take out the rind. Sweeten, and flavour either with cinnamon, rose or orange-flower water, or vanilla. While cooling, stir in a little white wine and brandy, pour into moulds, and allow it to become firm in a cool place.
A gelatine-set cream mould from the era before packet gelatine, when the setting agent came from fish. The proportions are sound; the ingredient and the language need translating.
- IsinglassDried sturgeon swim bladder, sold in leaf or shredded form and used as a setting agent before commercial gelatine took over. It is still available for brewing and for conservation work, but the kitchen substitute is plain gelatine. Two ounces of isinglass to three pints of liquid is a firm, unmoulding set; with modern powdered gelatine that corresponds to roughly 1 oz (28 g) for the same volume, though isinglass strength varied enormously and the equivalence is approximate.
- The one thing that mattersGelatine and isinglass both lose setting power with prolonged high heat. The quarter-hour boil probably reflects the coarser isinglass of the period, which needed longer to extract. If you are using modern gelatine, bloom it cold and dissolve it into the hot milk off the heat rather than boiling it for fifteen minutes.
- New milkSimply fresh whole milk, as opposed to milk that had stood and been skimmed. Use whole milk; the fat content matters to the texture here.
- Lemon rindPare it in wide strips with no white pith, which turns bitter over a long infusion. Removing it before sweetening, as directed, is the right order.
- Rose and orange-flower waterBoth are still sold, and strengths vary widely between brands. Start with half a teaspoon in the full quantity and taste.
- The wine and brandyAdded while cooling, not while hot, so the alcohol is not driven off. Add it once the mixture is tepid but still fluid, and keep the total under about 4 fl oz for three pints of liquid; too much, or a heavier hand, will soften the set.
- Moulds and settingRinse the moulds with cold water and do not oil them; the film of water releases the blancmange cleanly. A "cool place" means the refrigerator, and it wants at least six hours, better overnight. To turn out, dip the mould briefly in hot water and invert onto a wetted plate so the mould can be slid into position.
- YieldThree pints of liquid gives a large mould serving ten to twelve, or a dozen or more individual dariole moulds.
Blancmange began in medieval Europe as a genuinely white dish — shredded capon or fish pounded with almonds, rice and sugar, the name meaning simply "white food" — and only became a sweet milk jelly over the course of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries as the meat dropped away and the setting agent became the point. Isinglass, prepared from the swim bladders of sturgeon and imported largely through Russia, was the prestige setting agent of the Victorian kitchen: cleaner-tasting and clearer-setting than calf's-foot jelly, and considerably more expensive. Cassell's specifies "the best." The flavourings listed here — cinnamon, rose water, orange-flower water, vanilla — are the standard nineteenth-century sweet register, with the two flower waters being survivals of much older medieval and Near Eastern practice that vanilla would largely displace by the twentieth century. That Cassell's gives "another way" at all is characteristic of the dictionary format, which collected variant methods side by side rather than settling on one.