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Chocolate Blanc-Mange
Irish Moss Blanc-Mange flavored with chocolate. Melt one and one-half squares unsweetened chocolate, add onefourth cup sugar and one-third cup boiling water, stir until perfectly smooth, adding to milk just before taking from fire. Serve with sugar and cream.
This is a variation entry, not a standalone recipe: it assumes you have the book's Irish Moss Blanc-Mange in front of you and only tells you how to work chocolate into it. A few notes on what the original takes for granted.
- The base you need firstIrish Moss Blanc-Mange in this book is roughly one-third cup Irish moss, soaked and picked over, cooked with a quart of milk and a little salt in a double boiler, then strained and turned into a mold. Find that recipe before starting this one; the chocolate instruction alone will not get you a dessert.
- Irish mossCarrageen, a dried red seaweed sold in Irish and health-food shops and online. It must be soaked in cold water and picked over for bits of shell and grit, and it is the setting agent here no gelatin is used.
- Squares of chocolateA square meant one ounce, so one and one-half squares is 1.5 oz unsweetened chocolate approximately, though modern bars are often sold in 1 oz segments as well. Unsweetened baking chocolate is still the right product; cocoa powder will not behave the same way.
- The hingeAdd the chocolate paste to the hot milk at the very last moment, just before the pan comes off the fire, as directed. The carrageen has already done its work by then, and there is nothing to be gained by cooking the chocolate in.
- StrainingPress the milk through a fine sieve to leave the moss behind. Anything that gets through will be felt in the finished dessert, so a doubled cheesecloth over the sieve is worth the trouble.
- The setCarrageen gives a soft, quivering, faintly custardy set, nothing like the firm rubber of a gelatin mold. Chill at least four hours, and expect it to slump slightly when turned out. Rinse the mold with cold water rather than oiling it.
- YieldThe book gives no yield; a quart of milk plus the chocolate mixture makes rather more than a quart and will serve about six. "Serve with sugar and cream" most likely means plain cream poured over at table rather than whipped.
Blanc-manger began in medieval Europe as a white dish of pounded almonds and rice with shredded capon or chicken, and by the nineteenth century the name had settled onto any pale milk pudding stiffened with something gelatin, cornstarch, arrowroot, or seaweed. Irish moss, or carrageen, takes its name from the Irish carraigín, "little rock," and was harvested along the Atlantic coasts of Ireland and later of Massachusetts, where a substantial industry grew up around Scituate and the South Shore within reach of Boston's kitchens. It may be that this local supply is why a Boston cooking school book treats carrageen blanc-mange as a standard rather than a curiosity, and why the chocolate version gets only a few lines: the plain one was assumed knowledge. Carrageen puddings were also standard invalid cookery, being cheap, bland, and easy to digest, qualities often suggested as an explanation for how often they appear in household manuals of the period.