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Vanilla Blanc-Mange
One quart of milk, six level tablespoons of Larkin Corn Starch, moistened in eight tablespoons of milk. Scald one quart of milk.
Moisten six tablespoons of Corn Starch in eight tablespoons of milk, and add to scalded milk. Cook fifteen minutes, and add two eggs beaten with three-fourths of a cup of granulated sugar. When eggs are thoroughly mixed, take from fire and add one-half teaspoon of Larkin Vanilla Flavoring Extract and one-half teaspoon of Larkin Orange Flavoring Extract. Pour into a mold, set in cool place until thoroughly cold, and serve with cream.
A plain cornstarch pudding of the sort that filled the dessert page of nearly every promotional cookbook of the period. It works, but two details in the original need translating: the fifteen-minute cook and the way the eggs go in.
- The hinge: temper the eggsBeating two eggs with the sugar and dumping them into a pan of near-boiling starch will curdle them into threads. Whisk a cup of the hot mixture into the egg-and-sugar first, return it all to the pan, and stir over low heat for a minute or two until it thickens and no raw-egg smell remains.
- Fifteen minutes means a double boilerFifteen minutes over gentle heat — A quart of milk thickened with starch scorches quickly over direct heat. The original does not say what vessel to use; a bowl or upper pan over simmering water, stirred, is the safest way. The starch does need to get near boiling at least briefly to lose its chalky taste and reach full thickening power.
- Larkin Corn StarchThe Larkin Company of Buffalo sold soap and groceries by mail and gave away cookbooks that named its own products at every turn. Any plain cornstarch substitutes exactly; six level tablespoons is about 45 g, which is a firm, sliceable set for a quart of milk rather than a spoonable pudding.
- The flavoring extractsHalf a teaspoon each of vanilla and orange extract. Extract strength varies, so start with the stated amount. Grated orange zest steeped in the hot milk gives a rounder result than orange extract.
- UnmoldingRinse the mold with cold water before filling and do not grease it. Four to six hours in the refrigerator, or overnight; to turn it out, dip the mold in warm water for a few seconds and invert onto a chilled plate.
- Serve with creamPlain unwhipped pouring cream, poured around the base. Blanc-mange of this kind was often sent to table with fruit, a preserve, or stewed berries alongside.
- YieldA quart of milk gives about 1.25 quarts of pudding, so a 1.5-quart mold allows room; serves six to eight.
Blanc-mange began in medieval Europe as a genuinely white dish of pounded chicken or fish with almonds, rice and sugar, and the name survived long after the meat left it. By the nineteenth century it meant a molded milk pudding set with isinglass, gelatine, Irish moss or, increasingly, cornstarch, which was cheap, reliable and needed no soaking. That last shift is why this recipe exists at all: cornstarch manufacturers and the grocery houses that sold their product printed blanc-mange recipes constantly, since a molded dessert made from a boxed starch demonstrated the ingredient better than anything else on the dessert page. Larkin, a Buffalo soap company that grew into a mail-order grocery empire on the strength of premium clubs, issued cookbooks like this one to keep its own brand names in front of the cook every time she opened the book.