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Blanc Mange
2¼ cups scalded milk Pinch of salt 1 teaspoon vanilla 6 level tablespoons cornstarch 1/4 cup cold milk 1/3 cup sugar Stir the cornstarch and cold milk together, adding the sugar. Pour the scalded milk slowly over the first mixture and stir until it thickens. Cook in a double boiler for twelve minutes; pour into a wet mold and stand aside to cool. When ready to serve, turn from the mold and decorate with candied cherries or preserved fruit. Serve with cream and sugar or with boiled custard sauce.
A cornstarch blancmange of the firm, unmoldable sort. The starch ratio here is high by modern dessert standards because the pudding has to stand up on a plate.
- The hinge: cook it long enoughTwelve minutes over the double boiler is not padding. Cornstarch thickens well before it is cooked out, and a pudding pulled early tastes chalky and weeps in the mold. Hold it at a bare simmer in the top pan and stir often.
- Scalded milkHeat until small bubbles ring the edge of the pan and a skin begins to form, roughly 180F. It never needs to boil.
- Where the vanilla goesThe original lists it but never places it. Stir it in off the heat, after cooking, or the aroma cooks away.
- Starch quantitySix level tablespoons is about 1 3/4 oz (50 g) for 2 1/2 cups total milk. That yields a dessert firm enough to slice. For a spoonable pudding served in glasses, four tablespoons is nearer the modern proportion.
- Level tablespoonsOld recipes distinguish level from heaping and this one specifies level. With starch that distinction is worth honoring; scrape the spoon flat with a knife.
- A wet moldRinse the mold in cold water and pour out the excess without drying it. The film of water is what lets the set pudding drop free. A metal or glass mold of about 3 cups is right.
- Chilling and unmolding"Stand aside to cool" presumably meant somewhere cool rather than a refrigerator; refrigerate at least four hours, and press plastic wrap onto the surface to stop a skin forming. To turn it out, dip the mold briefly in warm water and invert onto a chilled plate.
- YieldAbout 2 1/2 cups, serving four to six as a molded dessert.
Blancmange began as something quite different: a medieval European dish of pounded almonds, rice or starch and often shredded capon, valued because it was white, and the name simply says so in French. By the nineteenth century the meat had gone and the dish appeared in several forms, some set with isinglass or gelatin, others thickened with starch. American cookbooks of the late 1800s and early 1900s commonly printed Irish moss, gelatin and cornstarch versions side by side, and cornstarch is often said to have grown cheaper and more widely available as a boxed grocery staple in the years after the Civil War. That is the version here: a plain, inexpensive, reliably molded pudding whose whole appeal was the shape it held and whatever fruit and custard sauce the cook could put around it.