Important: Safety Warning
This page prescribes plants as medicine according to pre-modern medical theory. Several of the plants named are toxic, correct identification is difficult, and the doses given have no scientific basis. Do not ingest or apply any preparation described here.
This information has been left in for historical purposes but should not be acted upon.
Blancmange, Cheap
1/2 lemon, 4 laurel-leaves. AVERAGE COST, 1s, INGREDIENTS for quart mould.- lb. of sugar, 1 quart of milk, 1½ oz. of gelatine, the rind of lemon, 4 laurel-leaves. AVERAGE COST, 18.
Put all the ingredients into a lined saucepan, and boil gently until the isinglass is dissolved; taste it occasionally to ascertain when it is sufficiently flavoured with the laurel-leaves; then take them out, and keep stirring the mixture over the fire for about taste. AVERAGE COST, 18. 6d. it, stirring it until the isinglass is dissolved.
Add sugar and any flavouring that may be preferred with the cream. Stir it again till it nearly boils, strain it, keep stirring till nearly cold, then put it in a mould.
TIME.- hour.
Blonde Sauce (for Fish). INGREDIENTS.- pint of melted butter, 3 tablespoonfuls of stock, 1 onion, 2 mushrooms, 1 lemon, 1 glass of sherry, yolks of 3 eggs, parsley. AVERAGE COST, 8d. per pint.
Slice the onion, chop the mushrooms and parsley, and put them into a stewpan with the butter, stock and sherry, and the rind and juice of the lemon. Simmer slowly for 1/2 hour, then whisk the yolks of the eggs and add to the sauce. Stir for a few minutes over the fire, strain through a sieve, and serve in a tureen.
TIME. In all, 36 minutes.
SEASONABLE at any time.
Boiling. Of all modes of cooking, this is the commonest, if not the easiest.
Anything can be boiled. It is upon keeping the water at the right heat that the success of the method depends. It is equally hot BLANCMANGE. 10 minutes. Strain it through a fine sieve into a jug, and, when nearly cold, pour it into a well-oiled mould, omitting the sediment at the bottom. After turning out it may be garnished with bright-coloured jelly, or a little of the blancmange may be coloured with cochineal.
TIME. hour.
SEASONABLE at any time.
Note. A nice blancmange, if wanted quickly, can be made by using the powders prepared by Goodall, Backhouse and Co., or Yeatman. A blancmange for children may be made of Brown and Polson's Corn-flour.
BOILING-POT. whether it boils fast or slowly. Fast boiling is in almost every instance, a mistake. It does not expediate the cooking; it wastes a great amount of fuel, and it hardens everything in the way of meat or poultry; whereas gentle simmering will render the food palatable and tender.
Such things, however, as flour foods (one of the principal ones, rice) should be kept in fast-boiling water, which prevents the grains from falling to the bottom in the saucepan, as it prevents the flour pudding from sticking.
In boiling fish, it should be put in water as hot as the skin will bear, without tearing BOUDIN À LA REINE. and wrinkling, and vinegar or white wine should be added to prevent its breaking.
Vegetables may be boiled quickly; and, in the case of green ones, with the saucepan lid off. The usual time to allow for boiling meat is 1/4 hour to the lb. ; but if the boiling be very gentle, a little more is desirable.
Boudin à la Reine. (An Entrée; M. UDE'S Recipe.) - INGREDIENTS for one entrée dish. The remains of cold roast fowls, 1 pint of Béchamel, salt and cayenne to taste, egg and bread-crumbs. AVERAGE COST, exclusive of the cold fowl, 1s. 3d.
Take the breasts and nice white meat from the fowls; cut it into small dice of an e qual size, and throw them into some good Béchamel (see BÉCHAMEL); season with salt and cayenne, and put the mixture into a dish to cool. When this preparation is quite cold, cut it into two equal parts, which should be made into boudins of a long shape, the size of the dish they are intended to be served on; roll them in flour, egg-and-bread-crumb them, and be careful that the ends are well covered with the crumbs, otherwise they will break in the frying-pan; fry them a nice colour, put them before the fire to drain the greasy moisture from them, and serve with the remainder of the Béchamel heated and poured round: this should be thinned with a little stock.
TIME.-10 minutes to fry the boudins.
The flavouring at the heart of this blancmange is the reason it cannot be reproduced, and several of its quantities have not survived intact in any case.
- The laurel leaves are the problemIn Victorian English cookery books "laurel leaves" used for a milk infusion usually means cherry laurel (Prunus laurocerasus) rather than the bay leaf of the spice rack. Its leaves contain cyanogenic glycosides that release hydrogen cyanide when the leaf is bruised and steeped, which is precisely what this method does; the almond-like flavour the cook is told to taste for comes from benzaldehyde released alongside the cyanide, so flavour and hazard travel together. Poisonings from laurel-flavoured creams and custards were reported in the period.
- Tasting as a measure of doseThe instruction to taste repeatedly until sufficiently flavoured makes the strength of the infusion depend on leaf size, age and bruising, none of which the recipe controls. There is no quantity here that can be described as within a safe range, and the correct response is to use a current blancmange recipe rather than to adjust this one.
- Gelatine and isinglassThe ingredient list calls for gelatine while the method speaks of isinglass, a swim-bladder setting agent that was still sold alongside it. The two are not interchangeable by weight, and older gelatine was probably less consistent in strength than the modern product, so an ounce quantity taken from a book of this date may well over-set a mixture made today.
- Quantities that have not survivedThe sugar is given only as a fraction of a pound with the figure missing, and the lemon rind is unnumbered. Nothing useful can be reconstructed from what is printed.
- A quart mouldAn imperial quart is 40 fl oz, about 1.14 litres, noticeably larger than a US quart.
- Oiling the mouldA "well-oiled mould" is likely to mean brushed with a bland oil such as almond or a flavourless salad oil rather than butter. The recipe tells the cook to leave behind the sediment at the bottom of the jug.
Blancmange began as a medieval dish of pounded almonds, rice and shredded white meat, and kept the name — literally "white eating" — long after the meat dropped out and it became a sweetened milk jelly. The almond flavour, though, was what people still expected from it, and cheap Victorian versions reached for cherry laurel leaves because their bruised foliage smells strongly of bitter almonds; the same shortcut appears in period recipes for custards and ratafia creams. The "cheap" in this title refers to the substitution of plain milk and a setting agent for the cream and ground almonds of the better recipe.