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Arrowroot Blanc Mange
Put half a pint of milk into a double boiler, scald and stir into it three heaping teaspoons of arrowroot which have been dissolved in one-half cup of cold water. Stir until thick and smooth; remove from the fire, flavor with a half teaspoon of vanilla, and pour into a mold to cool. Serve with sugar and cream.
A plain arrowroot pudding of the sickroom sort: no sugar in the pot, no eggs, nothing to tax a weak stomach. It comes together in about ten minutes, and most of what can go wrong goes wrong at the thickening stage.
- Do not let it boilArrowroot thickens well below boiling and then breaks down if held at a hard boil, turning thin and slightly slimy. The double boiler in the original is doing exactly this job — keep the milk at a scald, stir until it thickens, and take it off.
- Half a pintOne cup of milk. With the half cup of cold water used to slake the arrowroot, the total liquid is a cup and a half.
- Heaping teaspoonsAn unhelpfully loose measure. Three heaping teaspoons is roughly two level tablespoons, which gives a soft, spoonable set rather than a mold that will stand up cleanly. For a firmer turn-out, go to two and a half tablespoons.
- Slake the starch cold, alwaysThe half cup of cold water is not optional. Arrowroot dropped dry into hot milk seizes into lumps that will not stir out.
- Arrowroot versus cornstarchArrowroot sets glossy and near-transparent and has no raw-cereal taste, which is why invalid cookery preferred it. Cornstarch can be substituted, roughly volume for volume though guidance varies, but needs a longer cook to lose its flavor, and sets opaque and chalkier.
- Mold and chillRinse the mold in cold water before filling and it will release without greasing. Chill until cold and firm before turning out; a warm mold collapses.
- SweeteningThe recipe is deliberately unsweetened, with sugar handed at the table. If you would rather sweeten it in the pan, a tablespoon of sugar stirred into the milk as it scalds is enough.
- YieldAbout a cup and a quarter of finished blanc mange — one invalid's portion, or two small molds as a dessert.
Blanc mange began as the medieval blanc manger, a white dish of pounded almonds, rice and shredded capon that sat somewhere between meat course and sweet; by the nineteenth century the meat was long gone and the name attached to any pale molded pudding stiffened with almond milk, isinglass, Irish moss, cornstarch or arrowroot. The arrowroot version belonged squarely to the sickroom. Arrowroot — the starch of Maranta arundinacea, imported chiefly from the West Indies and particularly from St Vincent — was prized by Victorian and Edwardian household writers as the blandest and most digestible of thickeners, and it turns up throughout invalid-cookery chapters in gruels, jellies and puddings for patients who could keep down little else. Its place among such recipes reflects a period assumption that nursing the sick was a routine domestic skill with its own small repertoire: unsweetened, unspiced, white, and served in portions of a few spoonfuls at a time.