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Chocolate Blanc-Mange with Cream
Soak an ounce and a half of gelatine in half a pint of cold water for four hours. Warm one quart of milk, stir in the gelatine and half a pound of sugar; let it get hot and, when quite melted, strain; add three tablespoonfuls of grated chocolate, stir continually and boil for ten minutes. When nearly cold beat it with an egg-whisk for ten minutes; flavor to taste with vanilla and whisk until it begins to thicken. Then pour it into a cylinder-mould that has been wetted with cold water. Let it stand all night, then unmould and fill in the cavity with whipped cream.
A gelatin mould from the era when granulated gelatine was still sold by the ounce and cooks were expected to be generous with it. Two instructions here work against each other, and one of them should be ignored.
- Do not boil the gelatineTen minutes at a boil degrades gelatine's setting power and scorches milk. Heat the milk only until the gelatine and sugar dissolve, then add the chocolate and hold below a simmer for a minute or two.
- How much gelatineAn ounce and a half is roughly six of today's quarter-ounce envelopes, which would set five cups of liquid to the texture of an eraser. Three envelopes (about 3/4 oz) give a mould firm enough to turn out and still pleasant to eat.
- Soaking timeFour hours may reflect a coarser, slower-swelling gelatine than ours, though the recipe does not say so. Modern granulated gelatine blooms fully in 5 to 10 minutes in cold water.
- Grated chocolateThis most likely means unsweetened cake chocolate. Three tablespoonfuls grated is roughly an ounce; cocoa powder is not a substitute at this ratio, and sweetened chocolate would make an already sweet mould cloying.
- Half a pound of sugarAbout one cup. That is very sweet by current taste for a quart of milk; two-thirds of a cup is closer to modern palates, especially if you are serving it with unsweetened whipped cream.
- The whisking stageBeating as it cools aerates the mixture into a light sponge rather than a dense jelly. Stop while it is still pourable and merely beginning to thicken -- once it sets in the bowl it cannot be moulded.
- Cylinder-mouldA tube or ring mould, 1 1/2 to 2 quarts. Wetting the mould with cold water is what this recipe calls for; to release it, dip the mould briefly in hot water and invert onto a chilled plate.
- YieldServes 8 to 10, as one dish brought to table, with the whipped cream heaped into the centre well.
Blanc-mange is usually rendered as something like "white eating," a medieval European dish of pounded almonds and sugar, typically set with rice or almond starch and often including capon; the setting agents later associated with it -- isinglass, hartshorn or calves' foot jelly -- belong more to the early modern period. A chocolate blancmange is therefore a cheerful contradiction that nineteenth-century cooks embraced without apology. What made it a hotel staple was commercial powdered gelatine, which by the end of the century was said to be sold by the ounce in packets, and which reduced a two-day business of boiling bones to an afternoon's soaking. Oscar Tschirky, who came to the new Waldorf in 1893 as maitre d'hotel and put his name to this book a few years later, was collecting the working repertoire of a large kitchen rather than inventing dishes; a moulded sweet that could be made the night before, held cold, and finished at the last minute with whipped cream was exactly the sort of thing a banquet service needed. The instruction to boil the gelatine for ten minutes is a period habit that survived in print long after it stopped being good advice.