Important: Safety Warning
This page calls for twenty raw bitter almonds in a dessert. Bitter almonds contain amygdalin, which releases hydrogen cyanide, and are especially dangerous to children. Their sale for eating is restricted in many countries today.
This information has been left in for historical purposes but should not be acted upon.
Blancmanger
It is needless to give the old receipt for this, because nobody would eat it. In the days of the English king Richard II. it was a fowl first roasted, then - Blancmanger cut to pieces and served in syrup which was whitened with milk, rice, and almond paste. As late as the days of Madame de Maintenon-that is, at the end of the reign of Louis XIV. --the court physician, Fagon, ordered it to be prepared of the breasts of fowls and almond milk for consumptive patients; and later on, when we come to the article Gallimawfrey, it will be seen that the title of the dish implies a fowl.
For the modern receipt, the best and simplest is that of Carême, and depend upon it when Carême is simple he has right upon his side. He is loud in his praise of it, and hazards the prophecy that Blancmanger prepared in his simple way will always be preferred to other creams, and even to the most beautiful jellies, because of the pleasant, nourishing, and soothing qualities of the almond. Unhappily for his renown as a prophet, Blancmanger is losing its popularity, because although the almonds may be as good and as loved as ever, the world has ceased to believe in isinglass, and laughs to scorn the gelatine which is too often used instead of it.
Blanch a pound of sweet almonds and twenty bitter ones. Pound them in a mortar, moistening them from time to time with half a spoonful of water to keep them from turning to oil. When they are pounded quite smooth, pass them into a bowl, and mix them with five wineglassfuls of filtered water. Then arrange a napkin over an oval dish, so that the almond milk may be poured into it and strained through it by twisting it at either end. Add twelve ounces of sifted sugar, and when this is dissolved pass the Blancmanger a second time through the napkin. Next mix into it, somewhat more than warm, an ounce of clarified isinglass. Last of all pour it into a mould which has been rubbed with sweet oil of almonds, and which has been settled on ice. The Blancmanger thus prepared will be delightful in itself, but any flavour wished for may be added to it-as rum, lemon, vanilla, coffee, chocolate, strawberry.
Blanquette...
BLANQUETTE is as good a name as one could get for a white sauce, and it is a name which might well be adopted in England, where it would be thoroughly understood. There is absolutely no difference between a Blanquette sauce and the so-called Allemande or German sauce, unless it be this-that occasionally there is chopped parsley put into the former. A Blanquette of fowls, of sweetbreads, or of veal, means simply the serving of these things in the white Allemande. The white parsley and butter sauce which is so common in England with boiled chickens is but a rough and ready Blanquette. The Poulette sauce is the same thing, with sometimes chopped mushrooms added and with a squeeze of lemon.
BLEU (au bleu). - A phrase of the French kitchen for the simplest method of cooking fish. It means cooking it either in plain salt and water, or in white wine with parsley and onions. Originally the wine was red; and hence the name blue-the common red wine about Paris being called small blue (petit bleu), as we say small beer in England. What with the old style and the new, however, there is an odd medley of colours-white, red, and blue.
BLONDE DE VEAU is described at length in the article on Soup. It is a double veal broth, which is much in request for mixing with soups and sauces for its smooth gelatinous texture, and also for its fine colour and flavour, which are brought out by making it fall to a glaze at an early stage of its preparation. Perhaps it is overrated; it certainly was at one time. Early in the last century it became all the rage in France. There is a letter of Voltaire's in which he invites St. Lambert to visit him at Cirey. "Come to Cirey," he says. "There Madame du Châtelet will not poison you. There is not a spoonful of beef gravy (jus) in her kitchen; everything is done with blonde de veau : we shall live a hundred years, and you will never die." • Boarshead
Carême's method is straightforward enough, but one ingredient in it puts the dish outside what can be made in a modern kitchen. The notes below explain why rather than how.
- The twenty bitter almondsBitter almonds contain amygdalin, which releases hydrogen cyanide when the kernels are crushed and moistened — exactly what pounding them in a mortar with water does. Nothing in this receipt applies heat, so nothing drives the cyanide off; the almond milk is strained, sweetened, set and eaten cold.
- Why the quantity mattersTwenty bitter almonds to a pound of sweet is the conventional historical flavouring proportion, but it is still a meaningful quantity of amygdalin, divided among however many portions the mould yields; the amygdalin content of any given batch of kernels varies widely, so there is no way to reason about the dose from the page.
- You will not find them anywaySale of raw bitter almonds for eating is prohibited or tightly restricted in the United States and much of Europe. What is sold today as bitter almond flavouring is either benzaldehyde or an extract from which the cyanogenic compounds have been removed, and it is not what Carême was pounding.
- IsinglassThe setting agent here is isinglass, a collagen gelatine prepared from the swim bladders of sturgeon and other fish. Kettner's remark that the world has ceased to believe in it comes at the period when leaf and powdered gelatine were displacing it — though he scorns the gelatine substitute too. Isinglass survives now chiefly as a fining agent in brewing.
- The vessels and measuresA wineglassful in this period is roughly two fluid ounces, so five of them is about a cup and a quarter. The napkin twisted at both ends is a straining cloth, the ancestor of a jelly bag.
- If you want blancmangeUse a current recipe. An almond blancmange built on sweet almonds alone, or on commercial almond milk, is a different and entirely safe dish.
Kettner's own opening is the best short history of the word there is: blanc manger means simply "white food", and in the medieval kitchen it was a dish of pounded capon or chicken with almond milk, rice and sugar — savoury and sweet at once, in the way medieval cookery habitually was, and prized as much for being white as for anything else. White food was invalid food, which is why Fagon is described prescribing it to consumptives at the end of Louis XIV's reign; the association of almond milk and shredded fowl with the sickroom lasted for centuries. Somewhere in the eighteenth century the fowl dropped out and the almond stayed, leaving a set cream that kept the old name. Carême's version, given here, is the hinge: pure almond milk, sugar, and a setting agent, with the flavour variations listed at the end pointing straight at the moulded creams of the Victorian dinner table. Kettner, writing in the 1870s, already sees the fashion turning, and blames it on the setting agent rather than the almonds — a fair reading, since cheap gelatine made the dish easy, ubiquitous and dull.