Home › The Principles of Cookery › Corn-Flour Blancmange
Corn-Flour Blancmange
Mix very smoothly four ounces of corn-flour with a little cold milk, pour over it a quart of boiling milk, return it to the saucepan, and stir it constantly. Let it remain on the fire for four minutes after it comes to a boil. Sweeten and flavour it. Pour it into a mould, and when cold turn it out. Serve with it a compote of any kind of fruit. Time, twenty minutes. Probable cost, 6d., exclusive of the fruit.
A stiff moulded milk pudding that depends entirely on getting the starch fully cooked and the proportions right for unmoulding. Two things decide whether it works: a smooth slurry to begin with, and a genuine boil to finish.
- Corn-flour is cornstarchIn British usage corn-flour means what American cooks call cornstarch — the pure white starch, not cornmeal or maize flour. Substituting cornmeal will give you a gritty porridge that never sets clear.
- Quantities in modern termsFour ounces of cornstarch is roughly 7/8 cup by volume (about 3/4 cup plus 2 tablespoons), though weighing is far more reliable. Cassell's works in imperial measure, so its quart is about 40 fl oz — closer to 4 3/4 US cups than 4. The recipe lists the "little cold milk" for the slurry separately, but it can simply be taken from the milk you are heating, roughly 1/2 cup.
- The hinge: cook the starch outThe four minutes of boiling after it thickens is not padding. Cornstarch that is only brought to the thickening point tastes raw and chalky, and the pudding will weep as it cools. Keep it moving with a whisk or spatula, right into the corners of the pan.
- Sweetening and flavourThe original leaves both open. About 1/3 to 1/2 cup sugar suits a quart, stirred in off the heat, with vanilla, a strip of lemon peel infused in the milk beforehand, or a spoonful of brandy. Almond flavouring is common in blancmange recipes of the period; use almond extract if you want that note.
- The mouldRinse the mould with cold water and leave it wet, or brush it very lightly with a neutral oil. Pour the mixture in while still hot so it settles into the pattern, and press a disc of parchment onto the surface if you object to a skin.
- Setting time"When cold" means thoroughly chilled — at least 4 hours, better overnight, in the refrigerator. To turn it out, dip the mould briefly in hot water and invert onto a wetted plate so the pudding can be nudged into position.
- YieldA quart of milk fills a 1 1/2-quart mould and serves six to eight. The stated twenty minutes covers the cooking only, not the chilling.
- The compoteThe fruit is doing the work of flavour here — the blancmange itself is deliberately mild. Poached rhubarb, plums, apricots or a raspberry compote all suit it, and something sharp is better than something sweet.
Blancmange began in medieval Europe as a genuinely white dish — the name is Old French for "white food" — built on pounded almonds, sometimes with capon or rice, and served as a savoury-sweet centrepiece. By the eighteenth century it had become a sweet almond-milk jelly set with isinglass or calf's-foot gelatine, laborious and expensive. What Cassell's gives here is the Victorian democratisation of it: commercially refined cornstarch, sold in Britain as corn-flour and marketed heavily by firms such as Brown & Polson, who were selling patent corn flour from Paisley by the mid-1850s, put a firm moulded pudding within reach of any household with milk and a saucepan. The probable cost of sixpence is the point of the entry as much as the method — a shaped, turned-out dessert for the price of a quart of milk.