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Fluffy Corn-Starch Blanc Mange
Scald 1 pint of milk in a double boiler. Mix together 3 almost level tablespoonfuls of cornstarch, 3 tablespoonfuls of granulated sugar and 1/4 of a teaspoonful of salt. Mix to a cream with cold milk, turn quickly into the hot milk and stir until smoothly thickened. Cover and cook for forty-five minutes. Whip the whites of 3 eggs to a stiff, dry froth. Turn into the corn-starch, stir and mix lightly for three minutes, add any desired flavoring and take from the fire. Turn into wetted molds and set aside until cold, then turn out and serve with custard sauce or cream and sugar. This dessert may be varied by adding the yolks of eggs three minutes before stirring in the beaten whites.
A cornstarch pudding lightened with beaten whites, essentially a stovetop soufflé that sets cold. Two things decide whether it works: a genuine double boiler and a long enough cook to kill the raw-starch taste.
- The hinge: keep it off direct heatThe whole dish is built on gentle, indirect heat. Cornstarch thickened over a direct flame scorches on the bottom and the scorch flavours the whole mould; the water in the lower pan should simmer, not boil hard.
- The missing measurement"Mix to a cream with cold milk" gives no quantity. About 1/4 cup of cold milk is enough to make a pourable slurry of the starch, sugar and salt; the recipe reads as extra milk beyond the scalded pint, though holding it back from the pint also works. Whisk it smooth before it goes into the hot milk or it will lump.
- "Almost level" tablespoonsRead it as a scant spoonful rather than a heaped one; period spoon sizes were not standardised. Three level modern tablespoons of cornstarch to a pint of milk gives a soft set that will just hold a turned-out shape; add a fourth if you want it firmer for a fancy mould.
- Forty-five minutesThat is not a mistake. Over a double boiler the mixture thickens within five minutes but still tastes chalky; the long covered cook hydrates the starch fully. Twenty-five to thirty minutes is enough in practice, stirring once or twice, but do not stop at the point of thickening.
- Folding in the whitesStiff, dry whites stirred into hot starch for three minutes get some cooking from the residual heat, but the mixture is well below boiling and the whites are not reliably pasteurised. Use pasteurised whites if you are serving anyone pregnant, elderly or immune-compromised.
- Adding the yolksThe variation is worth taking. Temper the yolks with a spoonful of the hot mixture first, return them to the pan for the three minutes the recipe allows, then fold in the whites off the heat.
- Wetted mouldsRinse the moulds in cold water and do not dry them; the film of water is what lets the set pudding drop out. Individual cups or a 1-quart mould both work. Chill at least four hours, preferably overnight.
- Flavouring and yieldA teaspoon of vanilla, or a little grated lemon zest scalded with the milk, is the usual treatment. The pint of milk makes four modest servings, five with a custard sauce.
Blancmange began as the medieval blanc manger, a white dish of pounded almonds and shredded capon or fish, sweet and savoury at once, thickened with rice. By the nineteenth century the meat had gone and the thickener had changed: first isinglass and gelatine, then arrowroot, then cornstarch, which American mills began producing in quantity from the 1840s and which was cheap, shelf-stable and marketed hard to housewives with recipe booklets. A dessert of this kind was economical — a pint of milk, three spoonfuls of starch and three eggs feeds a family for pennies, and the beaten whites are doing the work that cream would otherwise do. The folded-in whites make it what some period books call a "cornstarch soufflé," the fluffy branch of a very old family of white puddings; the related "snow pudding" of the period is generally a gelatine-and-white dessert rather than a cornstarch one.