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Banana Blanc Mange
To one quart boiling milk add one-half cup of sugar, a pinch of salt, and three tablespoons of cornstarch dissolved in one-half cup of cold water. When it thickens stir in the pulp of three large bananas and the stiff-beaten white of an egg. Set away to cool in a mould. Serve with thin custard sauce.
A cornstarch pudding of the plainest sort, lifted by banana pulp. The whole thing hangs on cooking the starch long enough to lose its raw taste while keeping the fruit from being stirred in too early.
- Cook the starch outThree tablespoons cornstarch to a quart of milk is a soft-set mould. After it thickens, keep it at a bare simmer two to three minutes more, stirring, or the finished pudding tastes chalky and may weep as it cools.
- Add the bananas off the heatMash or sieve the pulp of three large bananas and stir it in once the pan is off the burner. Held over heat, banana turns grey-brown and the flavour flattens toward something cooked and dull.
- The egg whiteBeaten white stirred into a pudding still near boiling will set in fine threads and lightens the texture; it is not a meringue and will not stay fluffy. Fold it in immediately after the starch has finished cooking, while the mixture is at its hottest, so the white coagulates rather than sitting raw in a cooling pudding.
- Wetting the mouldRinse the mould with cold water and do not dry it, or dip it briefly in cold water before filling. A dry mould grips a cornstarch pudding and makes it much likelier to tear coming out. Reckon on a mould of at least 1.5 quarts, or six to eight individual cups, as the mixture comes to roughly six cups.
- Cooling time"Set away to cool" implies nothing more than a cool larder or an icebox; the recipe gives no time. In practice about four hours in the refrigerator is the minimum for a clean unmoulding, and overnight is better. Cover the surface to stop a skin forming.
- Thin custard sauceThe period sauce is a stirred custard, not a pastry cream: about 2 cups milk, 3 egg yolks, 3 tablespoons sugar, cooked to 170-175F, then strained and chilled. It should coat a spoon and pour freely.
- Banana ripenessUse bananas heavily freckled but not blackened. Underripe fruit is starchy and slightly astringent, which is very noticeable in a dish this bland.
- YieldServes six to eight as written.
Blanc mange began as a medieval European dish of pounded almonds and rice or breadcrumbs, thickened by those ingredients themselves, and its French name simply means "white food." By the late nineteenth century American cooks had reduced it to a cornstarch or arrowroot milk pudding, cheap and quick and often served with a pouring custard or stewed fruit. Cornstarch, commercially manufactured in the United States from the 1840s onward, made the dish a fixture of household cookbooks and invalid cookery alike. The banana version belongs to a later moment: fast steamers and the growth of the Central American fruit trade from the 1870s onward put bananas within reach of ordinary American kitchens for the first time. Folding the pulp into a familiar pudding was the obvious first step.