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Custard Blanc-Mange
Make a custard with one quart milk, four eggs, one teacup sugar. Stir into it while boiling, half a box gelatine after it has soaked ten minutes. Season with vanilla, and pour in moulds. Eat with whipped cream.--Mrs. E. P. G.
A stirred custard set with gelatine, from a period when "blanc-mange" covered anything pale, moulded and wobbling. The instructions assume you know how to make a boiled custard; the one thing they get dangerously vague about is heat.
- Do not actually boil the custard"While boiling" here means while still on the fire and hot enough to steam heavily, not at a rolling boil. Egg custard curdles above about 180F, so cook it to the point where it coats the back of a spoon and pull it off; the gelatine will dissolve well below scrambling temperature.
- Half a box of gelatineA box in period recipes is usually reckoned at somewhere around an ounce, though brands and package weights varied, so half a box is roughly half an ounce -- about two of the quarter-ounce envelopes sold today. Two envelopes to a quart gives a soft, spoonable set that will just hold a mould; a third envelope makes it firm enough to slice.
- Soaking the gelatineSprinkle it over about half a cup of cold water and leave it ten minutes as directed. Modern granulated gelatine is fully bloomed in five, but the extra time does no harm, and the cold-water step is not optional -- dropped in dry it will clump.
- A teacup of sugarNineteenth-century teacups run smaller than a modern measuring cup, generally reckoned at about three-quarters of a cup. That is roughly 5 ounces of sugar to a quart of milk, which is a moderately sweet custard given the whipped cream served with it.
- Vanilla"Season with vanilla" means extract, one to two teaspoons, added off the heat so the alcohol does not carry the flavour away. A split vanilla bean steeped in the hot milk before the eggs go in is an alternative.
- Moulding and chillingRinse the moulds with cold water and do not oil them; the film of water is what lets the custard slip out. Four hours in the refrigerator is the minimum, overnight is better. To unmould, dip the mould to its rim in warm water for a few seconds and invert.
- YieldA quart of milk plus eggs and sugar makes about five cups of finished blanc-mange -- six to eight servings, or one large mould.
Blanc-mange began as a medieval dish of pounded almonds, rice and often shredded capon, white in colour and savoury-sweet; by the nineteenth century the meat had gone and the name attached to any pale moulded pudding, whether set with isinglass, calf's-foot jelly, arrowroot, cornstarch or, increasingly, packaged gelatine. The "box" of gelatine in this recipe marks the change: prepared gelatine sold in packets and boxes was increasingly available in American groceries in the second half of the century, and it put moulded desserts within reach of any cook who had previously needed to boil calves' feet for hours. Adding eggs makes this a custard blanc-mange rather than a plain one, richer and yellower than the name suggests. Housekeeping in Old Virginia (1879) was compiled by Marion Cabell Tyree from contributions by Virginia housewives, which is why the recipe ends with initials rather than a byline -- these were working household formulas, written cook to cook, with everything the contributor assumed her reader already knew left out.