Home › Cold Desserts › Cocoanut Blanc Mange
Cocoanut Blanc Mange
4 tablespoons cornstarch 2 cups milk 4 tablespoons sugar 1/2 cup cocoanut Moisten the cornstarch with four tablespoons of milk. Heat the remainder of the milk with the cocoanut. When the flavor is entirely extracted from the cocoanut, strain it out. Add the sugar and moistened cornstarch. Stir until thickened; then cook in a double boiler one to two hours. Turn into individual molds wet with cold water or into a shallow, oblong pan, and cut into squares.
A plain cornstarch pudding that takes its flavor from an infusion rather than an extract. Two things decide whether it works: how hard you press the coconut when straining, and how long you are willing to leave it over water.
- The coconut"Cocoanut" in a book of this vintage usually means dried shredded coconut, unsweetened, though the word was also used for freshly grated. Modern sweetened flake will push the dessert past the intended sweetness; if that is all you have, cut the sugar to about 2 tablespoons.
- Extracting the flavorHeat the milk and coconut together to just below a simmer and hold it there 15 to 20 minutes off direct heat, then strain through a sieve and press the coconut hard with the back of a spoon. Most of the flavor is in the milk the shreds have absorbed, and unpressed coconut takes it to the compost.
- Milk lossThe coconut will drink up a fair amount of the 2 cups. Measure what you strain out and top it back up with fresh milk before adding the cornstarch, or the pudding will set stiff and chalky.
- The long cookingOne to two hours in a double boiler is far more than cornstarch needs to gelatinize. The likely reason is to cook out the raw starch taste of the coarser cornstarch of the day. With modern cornstarch, 20 to 25 minutes over simmering water, stirring occasionally, does the job.
- Add saltThe recipe gives none. A scant 1/4 teaspoon makes the coconut read as coconut.
- UnmoldingWetting the molds with cold water is worth doing as written; the film of water keeps the set pudding from gripping the mold. Chill until firm before turning out.
- YieldAbout 2 cups of finished pudding, which is four small molds or six squares cut from a shallow pan. It is meant to be served cold, on its own or with stewed fruit.
Blancmange began in medieval Europe as a genuinely white dish of pounded almonds, capon and rice, and drifted over centuries toward the milk-and-starch pudding recognizable here, keeping the French name for "white food" long after the poultry dropped out. The nineteenth-century American version was thickened with cornstarch, arrowroot or Irish moss, and appeared constantly in household books because it was cheap and could be molded into something that looked like a proper dessert. Its place in a meatless cookery volume is straightforward: vegetarian and Lenten cooking of the era leaned heavily on milk puddings for the sweet course, and shredded coconut, which is generally said to have reached American kitchens in packaged form around the 1890s, gave a cook a way to flavor one without buying an extract.