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Cocoanut Blanc Mange
4 cups milk ½ cup cornstarch 1/4 cup sugar 3 egg-whites ¼ teaspoon salt 1 cup Dromedary Cocoanut 1 teaspoon vanilla extract Lemon Sauce 2 teaspoons cornstarch 1 cup sugar 2 cups hot water 1 tablespoon butter 1 egg-yolk 1 lemon For pudding: Scald milk, add cornstarch mixed with sugar, cook ten minutes, then add cocoanut, vanilla and whites of eggs beaten with salt. Pour into a wet mold and set aside to chill. Turn out, decorate with Dromedary Cocoanut and serve with lemon sauce made as follows: Mix cornstarch with sugar, add water gradually, and cook eight minutes, stirring constantly. Add grated rind and strained juice of lemon, butter and yolk of egg. Cool before serving.
A cornstarch blanc mange from a coconut-brand promotional booklet, thickened on the stovetop and unmolded cold. A few of the quantities as printed do not add up, so read the ratios before you start.
- Cornstarch quantityOne and a half cups of cornstarch to four cups of milk would set into a solid block; the standard ratio for a molded blanc mange is about 2 tablespoons per cup of milk, so roughly half a cup here. Treat the printed figure as unusable and work from the ratio.
- SaltThe salt figure has lost its fraction. A quarter teaspoon is right for this volume of milk.
- Mixing the starchBlending the cornstarch with the sugar first is the point of that step: the sugar keeps the granules apart so they disperse in the scalded milk instead of lumping. Slake the mixture with a little cold milk if you want extra insurance.
- Ten minutes of cookingCornstarch thickens quickly but tastes raw until it has held near a boil for several minutes. Stir constantly over moderate heat, scraping the bottom of the pan, or the starch will scorch and the whole mold will taste of it.
- The egg whitesBeaten whites are stirred into the hot starch off the boil and are only partly cooked by the residual heat, so the finished pudding contains egg that has not reliably reached a safe temperature. Stir them in thoroughly or you get white threads through the pudding. Do not beat them to stiff peaks; soft and frothy folds in more evenly.
- Wetting the moldRinsing the mold in cold water and leaving it wet is what lets the set pudding release. Chill at least four hours, and dip the mold briefly in warm water before turning out.
- The coconutThe branded product was packaged shredded coconut; whether it was sweetened is not certain from the recipe. Unsweetened desiccated coconut works but will drink up moisture and dull the sweetness; if you use it, soak it in a little of the hot milk first.
- The lemon sauceTwo teaspoons of cornstarch to two cups of water gives a thin pouring sauce, which is what is wanted against a dense pudding. Add the yolk off the heat, whisking, and do not let the sauce boil afterward or it will curdle.
- YieldFour cups of milk plus the sugar, coconut and whites makes rather more than a quart; serves six to eight.
Blanc mange began in medieval Europe as a genuinely white dish of pounded almonds, capon or fish, and rice, and only became a sweet milk pudding much later; by the nineteenth century in English and American kitchens it meant milk thickened with isinglass, arrowroot, Irish moss, or gelatin and turned out of a shaped mold. Cornstarch versions like this one belong to the industrial era, when commercially refined corn starch made a firm, cheap, reliably setting pudding available to any household. The recipe comes from a booklet issued to sell a brand of packaged shredded coconut, part of a long publishing tradition in which food companies gave away small cookbooks to teach cooks new uses for a product that had not been a pantry staple a generation earlier.