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Blancmange
One and a half tablespoons of cornstarch, one of sugar, a pint of milk, a pinch of salt. Let the milk come to a boil; add the starch, dissolved in a little cold water, salt and sugar. Stir till thick, then cook for thirty minutes in a double boiler. When it has partly cooled, add a beaten egg and any flavoring desired. Serve with milk when cold.
A plain cornstarch pudding from the sickroom chapter, thin enough to be eaten with a spoon from a cup. The final step is the problem: a whole beaten egg is stirred into a pudding that has already partly cooled and is then chilled and served without further cooking.
- The uncooked eggOnce the pudding has "partly cooled" it is no longer hot enough to bring an egg to a safe temperature, and nothing after that point applies heat. The custard is then held cold and served, which gives any Salmonella present time in the danger zone rather than killing it.
- Who it was made forIf, as the chapter placement suggests, this belongs with the invalid cookery, it was aimed at the sick and convalescent — the people least able to shrug off an egg-borne infection. If you want a cornstarch blancmange, use a current recipe.
- A pint of milkTwo US cups. Nineteenth-century American cookbooks use the 16 fl oz pint, not the imperial 20 fl oz one, so a British reader following the measure literally will get a noticeably looser pudding.
- How thin it isA tablespoon and a half of cornstarch to a pint of milk is roughly half what a modern set pudding uses. The result would be pourable rather than firmly moulded, which is consistent with the direction to serve it with milk rather than turned out of a shape.
- The thirty minutesCornstarch thickens fully in a couple of minutes at a boil, so the long double-boiler cooking is not needed for thickening; period cookery writing commonly held that starch had to be thoroughly cooked to lose its raw taste and be digestible, which may be what is behind it.
- "Serve with milk when cold"This means cold milk poured over the dish at table, in the way one would sauce a blancmange or a junket. It is part of the serving, not an addition to the pudding.
- YieldAbout two cups, or three to four small sickroom servings.
Blancmange is simply French for "white food", and the dish began in medieval Europe as a pounded almond-and-capon or almond-milk pottage thickened with rice flour or almonds — white, bland, and prestigious. By the nineteenth century the meat had gone, and cheap manufactured cornstarch, which is generally said to have become widely available in America over the course of the mid-century, turned blancmange into an everyday milk pudding within reach of any kitchen. Its appearance here under invalid cookery reflects the period's sickroom doctrine: food for the ill should be pale, smooth, lightly sweetened and free of anything the digestion had to work at, and milk-and-starch dishes were the backbone of that diet alongside gruels, beef tea and arrowroot. The beaten egg stirred in at the end has often been read as a nod to the other half of the doctrine — that an invalid needed concentrated nourishment in a very small volume.