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Chocolate Blanc Mange
2 cups milk 1/4 cup sugar 1/4 cup cocoa 1/4 cup cornstarch 1/2 teaspoon vanilla Blend the cornstarch with an equal amount of milk. Heat the remainder of the milk in a double boiler; add the sugar, cocoa and vanilla. Add the moistened cornstarch, stirring until the milk has thickened. Cook one to two hours in the double boiler. Serve with a sauce. Malted milk may be substituted for the cocoa.
A plain cornstarch pudding of the sort that filled the dessert column of every early twentieth-century household book. Nothing here is difficult, but two of the instructions belong to a different kind of stove.
- The cooking timeOne to two hours in a double boiler is far longer than the starch needs, and it is the one thing to ignore. Cornstarch reaches full thickening power within a few minutes of coming to a simmer and gains little after that; 15 to 20 minutes over simmering water is ample, with the last 10 there to cook out the raw starch taste. Long double-boiler times of this kind are common in period cornstarch puddings.
- "An equal amount of milk"This means milk equal to the cornstarch, so 1/4 cup, taken from the 2 cups already measured. Use it cold; warm milk will lump the starch before it disperses.
- Cocoa lumpsDry cocoa floats and clumps in hot milk. Whisk the cocoa and sugar together dry, then stir the mixture into the hot milk, or sift both into the cold starch slurry.
- Vanilla timingThe recipe adds vanilla at the start, when volatile extract simply steams off. Stir it in after the pudding has thickened and come off the heat.
- SaltNo salt is listed. A scant 1/4 teaspoon sharpens both the chocolate and the sweetness considerably.
- Skin on topPress plastic wrap or buttered paper directly onto the surface while it cools, unless a skin is wanted.
- MouldingBlanc mange was normally set in a wetted mould and turned out. This proportion of starch to milk, two tablespoons per cup, will unmould readily if chilled at least four hours; rinse the mould with cold water first and do not grease it.
- Malted milk substitutionMalted milk powder is far less bitter and contains its own sugar. Substituting it 1:1 for the cocoa gives a much sweeter, paler pudding; cut the sugar to about 2 tablespoons.
- Yield and sauceServes four small portions. "Serve with a sauce" in this period usually meant a thin custard, a fruit syrup or sweetened cream poured around the turned-out mould.
Blancmange began as a medieval dish of pounded almonds, rice and often shredded capon, its name meaning simply "white food" — the whiteness was the point, and meat in it was unremarkable. By the nineteenth century it had shed the poultry, and in Anglo-American kitchens it split into two lines: one thickened with isinglass or gelatine, one with arrowroot, Irish moss or, increasingly, cornstarch, which was cheap and sold in branded boxes with recipes printed on them. A chocolate version is a late and frankly contradictory development, since it abandons the whiteness the name describes. The dish that began with shredded capon in it ends here as a dessert whose only animal ingredient is milk.