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Farina Blancmange
1 pint milk 1/4 cup sugar 1/4 cup farina A few grains salt Heat the milk with the sugar in a double boiler. Stir in the farina and salt, and continue to stir till the milk is thickened and the farina does not settle. Cook it in a double boiler one hour, then pour it into cups that have been wet with cold water. When cold, unmold and serve with cocoanut sauce. Cornstarch blancmange is made by substituting cornstarch for the farina, and stirring it smooth with a little of the milk saved out for that purpose before stirring it into the hot milk.
A plain milk pudding set by starch alone, with no eggs and no gelatin. It works as written; the only real skill is keeping the grains from settling into a lump on the bottom.
- FarinaFarina here is finely milled wheat semolina, sold today as Cream of Wheat or the like. Use the plain quick-cooking sort, not instant flavoured packets, and not coarse semolina for pasta.
- The hinge: stir until it thickensEverything depends on the first few minutes. Sprinkle the farina in slowly while stirring so it hydrates in suspension rather than sinking; once the mixture visibly thickens the grains stay put and the hour of double-boiler cooking needs only occasional attention.
- Why an hourThe recipe simply specifies an hour in the double boiler without saying why. Modern quick-cooking farina thickens and cooks through much faster; 20 to 30 minutes over water should give a smooth set without a skin or scorching.
- Cornstarch versionThe instruction to slake cornstarch in cold reserved milk first is not optional. Cornstarch tipped dry into hot milk seizes into lumps that will not stir out. Cornstarch also sets firmer than farina, so about 1/4 cup to a pint gives a distinctly stiffer mould.
- MouldsWetting the cups with cold water is the release mechanism, standing in for oil or a hot-water dip. Rinse and shake out rather than dry, and chill until fully cold and set before turning out, as the recipe directs.
- Cocoanut sauceThat is coconut, spelled as it commonly was into the early twentieth century. The recipe gives no formula; in books of this kind such a sauce is usually a sweet milk sauce with grated coconut, and sweetened coconut milk thinned with cream will do the same job.
- YieldA pint of milk fills four small moulds of about 4 oz each. Very lightly sweetened by current taste, so plan on a sauce or fruit alongside.
Blancmange kept its French name and lost its French meaning. The medieval dish was white and savoury-sweet, thickened with pounded almonds and often chicken; by the nineteenth century, when calf's-foot and then commercial gelatin and packaged starches became household goods, the name had shifted to mean almost any pale moulded milk pudding. Cookery books of this period print whole families of them side by side, distinguished only by the thickener at hand: farina, cornstarch, arrowroot, rice flour, Irish moss. Farina and cornstarch versions were cheap, needed no eggs, and could be made in quantity, which is why they turn up so persistently in domestic-science and invalid-cookery writing of the era, where a bland, digestible, easily varied sweet was thought a virtue rather than a shortcoming.