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Chocolate Blanc Mange
1 quart milk 1/2 box or 2 tablespoons gelatine 4 tablespoons grated chocolate 3 eggs 1 teaspoon vanilla Heat milk, add gelatine which has been soaked in a cup of water; add grated chocolate rubbed smooth in a little milk; add eggs; boil 5 minutes, stirring constantly; add vanilla. Pour into mold. Serve cold with sugar and cream.
A gelatine custard from the era when "blanc mange" had stopped meaning anything white. The recipe is workable, but two instructions need translating and one needs ignoring.
- Do not actually boil itWhole eggs in milk curdle at around 180F, so five minutes at a rolling boil will scramble them into grit no amount of stirring will fix. Beat the eggs, temper them with a ladle of the hot milk, return the mixture to the pan and hold it at 170-180F for a couple of minutes until it coats a spoon.
- Half a box of gelatineThe recipe's own equation of half a box with 2 tablespoons implies a full box of about 4 tablespoons. Two modern quarter-ounce envelopes (about 14 g) is roughly the equivalent and is in the right range for this quantity of liquid: firm enough to unmold, not rubbery.
- Soaking the gelatineA cup of cold water for 5 minutes until it swells and goes opaque, then stir it into the hot milk off direct heat. That cup of water is part of the total liquid, so the set is calculated with it included.
- Grated chocolateThis most likely means unsweetened block chocolate, grated so it would disperse readily in the milk. Four tablespoons of grated chocolate is roughly 1 oz; chopped bittersweet or 3 tablespoons of cocoa mixed to a paste with milk both work, but cocoa gives a leaner texture.
- Where the sugar isThere is none in the custard at all -- the sweetening arrives at the table as "sugar and cream." If you would rather sweeten it in the pan, 1/3 to 1/2 cup dissolved in the hot milk suits unsweetened chocolate.
- The moldRinse a 1 1/2-quart mold in cold water and do not grease it; the film of water is what lets the jelly release. Chill at least 4 hours, preferably overnight, then dip the mold briefly in warm water to unmold.
- YieldCloser to five cups of set custard once the soaking water is counted, which serves six to eight in small portions.
Blanc mange is simply French for "white food," and the earliest versions were generally something rather different from the modern dish: a pale preparation of rice and almond milk, often containing shredded capon, served at medieval tables as much for its whiteness as its flavour. By the late nineteenth century the name had detached from the colour entirely and come to mean any milk jelly set in a mold, which is how a brown chocolate one can appear without comment. Its place in American cookbooks is often tied to the growing availability of cheap, reliable commercial gelatine -- earlier cooks had to boil calves' feet or buy sheets of isinglass -- though the precise chronology is hard to pin down.