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Chocolate Mange
Dissolve one ounce Cox's gelatine in a pint cold water. Let it stand an hour. Then boil two quarts of milk, and add to it six ounces chocolate with the gelatine. Sweeten to your taste and pour into moulds. Eat with sauce made of cream, wine, and sugar.--Mrs. W. H. L.
A molded chocolate blancmange, thickened with gelatine rather than cornstarch. It is straightforward once you account for the strength of modern gelatine and the sweetness of modern chocolate.
- Cox's gelatineA well-known Edinburgh brand of packaged gelatine, sold by weight, which is why the recipe measures it that way. One ounce of modern powdered gelatine is four standard 1/4-oz envelopes.
- Set strengthOne ounce of gelatine to the recipe's ten cups of liquid (a pint of water plus two quarts of milk) gives a soft set by modern reckoning. If you want a mold that unmolds cleanly, expect to increase the gelatine or reduce the milk.
- Bloom, then dissolveThe pint of cold water only softens the gelatine during its hour of standing. It dissolves when it meets the hot milk, so whisk it in off the boil and keep whisking until no strands remain on the spoon.
- The chocolateSix ounces meant unsweetened cake chocolate, ground or grated. Modern bittersweet or semisweet bars carry their own sugar, so sweeten at the very end and taste, or the finished cream will be cloying.
- Grating and smoothnessChop or grate the chocolate before it goes in and let it melt in the hot milk rather than dropping in whole squares. Straining the mixture through a fine sieve before it goes into the molds removes any undissolved gelatine or chocolate grit.
- MouldsRinse the molds in cold water and leave them wet, or brush lightly with a neutral oil. Chill at least six hours, and dip the mold briefly in warm water to release.
- The sauceCream, wine and sugar, uncooked and unwhipped, poured around the turned-out mold. The recipe specifies only 'wine'; a fortified wine such as sherry or Madeira is the usual period choice.
- YieldTwo and a half quarts of liquid fills one large mold or eight to ten individual ones, and serves ten to twelve.
Blancmange began as a medieval European dish of almond milk thickened with rice, white by definition, and the name survived long after the color did; by the nineteenth century American cooks were making it with cornstarch, arrowroot, isinglass or gelatine, and adding chocolate, coffee or lemon at will. "Mange" here is plausibly, though not demonstrably, the clipped household spelling of that older word. Commercially packaged sheet gelatine, sold in convenient one-ounce doses by firms such as J. & G. Cox of Edinburgh, is what turned jellies and molded creams from a two-day operation involving boiled calves' feet into an afternoon's work. Its appearance in a Virginia compilation of the 1870s, credited only to a contributor's initials, marks a kitchen already buying its thickeners rather than rendering them.