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Fig Blanc Mange
Make as for Banana Blanc Mange; using one cup of fig pulp and one cup of chopped nuts and a little lemon tincture. Prepare a sauce with the yolk of the egg beaten with a tablespoon of sugar and stirred in with a pint of boiling milk. Add one teaspoon of cornstarch, wet with a little water, and remove from the fire. Nutmeg may be added or a dash of lemon extract. Serve cold. .
This is a cross-reference recipe: the body assumes you already have the Banana Blanc Mange in front of you, and only tells you what to swap. The essentials of the base are a cornstarch-thickened milk pudding, poured into moulds and chilled until firm.
- The missing baseA standard blanc mange of this period is roughly a pint of milk, 3 to 4 tablespoons cornstarch slaked in cold milk, 1/3 cup sugar and a pinch of salt, cooked until thick and then flavoured. Fold the fig pulp and nuts in off the heat, or they will sink and streak the pudding.
- Fig pulpDried figs need to be stemmed, simmered in water until soft and then mashed or sieved; a cup of pulp takes roughly 8 oz of dried figs. Fresh figs, if you have them, can be peeled and mashed raw, but the pudding will be looser and less sweet.
- Lemon tinctureAn alcohol-based lemon flavouring, essentially what is sold now as lemon extract. Half a teaspoon is a "little"; the recipe itself offers lemon extract as the alternative in the sauce.
- Cook the starch outThe instruction to add cornstarch and remove from the fire is the weak point. Starch needs to reach a full simmer for about a minute to thicken properly and lose its raw taste, so slake the teaspoon of cornstarch in cold water, stir it into the hot milk and let it bubble briefly before pulling the pan.
- The custard sauceDo not tip the yolk straight into boiling milk. Beat it with the sugar, whisk in a ladle of the hot milk to temper it, then return the lot to the pan over low heat. One yolk to a pint of milk gives a thin pouring sauce, which is what is wanted here.
- Chilling and unmouldingRinse the moulds in cold water before filling so the pudding releases. Four hours in the refrigerator sets it properly; overnight is better. Serve cold, as directed, with the sauce also chilled.
- YieldThe base quantities, with the cup of fig pulp and cup of nuts stirred in, make roughly two pints of pudding, with enough sauce for all of it.
Blanc mange is simply French for "white food", and the name outlived the dish it described: the medieval original was a pounded white meat, almond and rice preparation, savoury or barely sweet, that survived in English cookery for centuries before the nineteenth century reduced it to a moulded milk pudding thickened with cornstarch, arrowroot or isinglass. Cheap boxed cornstarch reached American kitchens from the 1840s onward, and blanc mange became a common everyday dessert, endlessly adaptable because the base is flavourless. Fruit-and-nut versions like this one sit alongside a body of turn-of-the-century cookery writing that promoted figs and nuts as wholesome, digestible foods, a preoccupation of the health-reform kitchens of the period. The figs would have been dried, and imported Smyrna figs were the best-known type on the American market at the time.