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Fruit Blancmange
A cup of any fruit juice, fresh or canned, heated, sweetened to taste and thickened with a tablespoon of cornstarch. Cook well and serve cold with milk. If a little less cornstarch is used, and, when nearly cold, the stiffly beaten white of an egg is added, a delicious float is the result. All juices should be strained.-Mary M. Willard.
A cornstarch pudding set with fruit juice rather than milk, from the invalid-cookery chapter. It is barely two sentences long, so most of the work is in filling the gaps the original leaves.
- The hinge: boil the starch"Cook well" means bringing the mixture to a full boil and holding it there a minute or two, stirring, until it loses any chalky taste and turns glossy. Cornstarch that is only heated through will taste raw and slump instead of setting.
- Slurry firstStir the tablespoon of cornstarch into a few tablespoons of cold juice before it goes near the hot pan. Dropping dry starch into hot liquid gives lumps that no amount of beating will fix.
- Acid thins cornstarchVery tart juices e — lemon, sour cherry, unsweetened cranberry — break down starch as it cooks, so a tablespoon per cup may set softly. Keep the boil short and stir gently once thickened rather than cooking it longer.
- Proportions and yieldOne cup of juice with a tablespoon of cornstarch gives a soft, spoonable set, about one invalid serving. For a firmer mould that will turn out of a cup you will need more starch, perhaps half again as much.
- SweeteningCanned fruit juice at the time could well have meant the syrup drained from home-canned fruit, already sweet. Modern bottled juice varies enormously; taste after the starch has cooked, since thickening dulls perceived sweetness.
- Chilling and skinPour into wetted cups or a bowl and press plastic wrap onto the surface, or the top sets to a rubbery skin. Give it at least three hours cold.
- The "float" variation uses uncooked eggBeaten raw egg white folded into a nearly cold pudding is never brought to a safe temperature. Given that the chapter is aimed at the sick, the elderly and children, this variation is best left alone; if you want a float, use a current recipe built on pasteurized whites.
- StrainingThe instruction to strain all juices matters more with fresh fruit than with bottled. Pulp and seed fragments settle out during chilling and spoil the clean set.
Blancmange began in medieval Europe as a genuinely white dish — the name is Old French for "white food" — built from pounded almonds, rice or starch, and often shredded capon, served as much to the sick as to the well. By the nineteenth century it had shed its meat and become a sweet moulded cream stiffened with isinglass, arrowroot, Irish moss or, increasingly, cornstarch, which spread as a kitchen ingredient from around the middle of the century. Making it with fruit juice instead of milk is a straightforwardly invalid-kitchen move: a bland, cold, easily swallowed dish, served cold with milk. That it carries a contributor's name, Mary M. Willard, is often taken as typical of the era's cookbooks, which are generally said to have been assembled in large part from recipes readers sent in.