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Strawberry Blancmange
Take a quart of clear stiff blancmange made with isinglass or gelatine. Sweeten this, and stir into it the juice which has been drawn from a quart of fresh strawberries. Mix the ingredients thoroughly, put the blancmange into a damp mould, and leave it in a cool place till set. Turn it upon a glass dish, and serve. To draw the juice from the strawberries, pick them, spread them on a large flat dish, and sprinkle over them about six table-spoonfuls of powdered sugar. Let them stand for six or eight hours, and pour away for use the syrup which has flowed from them.
A moulded gelatine dessert that depends on two things: a base stiff enough to stand unsupported, and strawberry syrup drawn slowly with sugar rather than cooked. Both need translating.
- The blancmange baseCassell assumes you already have a "clear stiff blancmange" — here a sweetened milk or thin cream jelly set with isinglass or gelatine, not the cornflour pudding the word later came to mean. Note that adding the strawberry syrup thins the mixture, so the base must be set firmer than you would want to eat on its own.
- Quarts and gillsA British quart is 40 fl oz, about 5 cups; if you are working from an American copy of the book, 32 fl oz. The strawberry quart is a volume of whole fruit, roughly 1 1/2 lb, which yields something in the region of 1/2 to 3/4 cup of syrup.
- Isinglass to gelatineIsinglass is a collagen from fish swim bladders, sold in leaf or shred form and of very inconsistent strength; it has all but vanished from kitchen use. Powdered or leaf gelatine replaces it directly, but the old quantities are no guide. For a jelly firm enough to turn out of a mould, count on about 20-25 g of powdered gelatine to the full quart of liquid, syrup included.
- Drawing the juice is the hingeSix to eight hours with sugar draws a clear, raw-tasting syrup by osmosis. Heating the fruit instead is faster but gives a jammy, cooked flavour and cloudy colour, and the point of the dish is the fresh note. Macerate covered in the refrigerator rather than on the counter.
- Acid and settingStrawberry syrup is acidic, and acid weakens a gelatine set. Stir the syrup in when the base is cool but still fluid, never while it is hot, and allow extra gelatine as above.
- CurdlingIf the base is milk or cream, adding fruit acid can cause it to break. Cool both to about the same temperature and add the syrup gradually, stirring; a base made with more sugar and less milk is more forgiving.
- The damp mouldRinsing the mould with cold water and not drying it lets the set jelly release. Chill at least 4 hours, better overnight, then dip the mould briefly in warm water and invert onto the wetted glass dish so you can slide the blancmange into place.
- YieldA quart mould serves 6 to 8. Reserved macerated strawberries, which the recipe silently discards, are worth serving round the base.
Blancmange began in the medieval kitchen as a genuinely white dish — almonds, pounded chicken or fish, rice, sugar — and by the nineteenth century had narrowed to mean a moulded white jelly of milk or cream, set first with isinglass and calves' foot stock and later with commercial gelatine. Moulded jellies were a test of a cook's judgement: no thermometer, an inconsistent setting agent, and a dessert that had to stand up on a glass dish in a warm dining room. Colouring and flavouring a white base with fruit juice was the standard way of getting variety out of one technique, and strawberry, drawn cold with sugar in the manner described here, kept the raw fruit's perfume. The arrival of reliable packaged gelatine in the second half of the century is generally credited with moving these dishes from the professional confectioner's repertoire into the ordinary household one, which is exactly the readership this dictionary addressed.