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Orange Blancmange
Take two table-spoonfuls of cornflour and blend it smoothly with half a pint of cold water. Wipe a lemon, and rub the yellow of the rind with six ounces of lump sugar. Strain the juice of six oranges and one lemon, and put all together into a saucepan and boil, stirring well, for seven or eight minutes. Pour into a mould, previously wetted with cold water, and turn out when set. Probable cost, 1s.
A fruit-juice mould rather than a milk pudding, thickened with cornstarch alone. It is simple, but two details decide whether it sets at all.
- Cornflour is cornstarchBritish cornflour is what American shops sell as cornstarch, not the finely milled maize flour called corn flour in the US.
- MeasuresHalf an imperial pint is 10 fl oz, about 1 1/4 US cups. Six ounces of sugar is roughly 7/8 cup. Six oranges yield somewhere between 1 and 1 1/2 cups of juice depending on the fruit, which means the total liquid is variable and the set will vary with it.
- Lump sugar and the rindLump sugar means sugar cubes or coarse loaf sugar, hard enough to abrade the zest. Rubbing the cubes over the lemon draws the oils into the sugar, which carries far more perfume than grated zest boiled in juice. A hard lump does this best; granulated abrades the peel far less effectively.
- Acid versus starchThis is the hinge. Citrus acid breaks down cornstarch on prolonged boiling, so seven or eight minutes at a rolling boil risks a mould that thins rather than firms. Bring it just to the boil, stir until it thickens and turns from cloudy to glossy, and take it off within two or three minutes.
- Blend cold, alwaysSlake the cornstarch in the cold water before anything hot touches it, and stir constantly once it comes up to heat. Starch this concentrated seizes into lumps the moment it hits heat unmixed.
- The mouldWetting the mould with cold water is not superstition; the film of water lets the set pudding release. The finished quantity runs a little over a pint, so allow a pint-and-a-half mould, or four individual dariole moulds.
- Setting and yieldThe original gives no time. Expect three to four hours in the refrigerator for a pint mould, and count on four modest servings. Dip the base briefly in warm water before turning out.
- CostOne shilling was the household guide price at the time of writing, of no use as a modern figure.
Blancmange means literally "white food," and the medieval original was a pale dish of pounded almonds, rice or capon flesh set stiff; by the eighteenth century it had become an almond-milk cream set with isinglass or calf's-foot jelly. An orange blancmange is therefore a contradiction in name, and the contradiction tells you exactly what had happened to the dish. Cheap packet cornflour, sold in Britain from the mid-nineteenth century onward, turned the elaborate set cream into something any kitchen could manage in ten minutes, and "blancmange" drifted into meaning any moulded starch pudding, whatever its colour. Cassell's prints this as a sweet whose whole appeal is a mould made from fruit alone with no dairy and no gelatine, a useful thing in a period when both were expensive and unreliable in warm weather.