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Salt (1 teaspoonful butter Blend)
1 teaspoonful butter Blend corn-starch with some of the cold coffee, stir with remainder into scalded milk, add sugar and sprinkling of salt. Cook in double boiler five minutes, then over fire until corn-starch boils.
Stir in butter just before taking up. This quantity of corn-starch, level measurement, makes a very delicate blanc mange. If preferred firmer, use six tablespoonfuls corn-starch.
The page has come down to us with its ingredient list mangled — the title itself is a fragment of a line about butter — so what survives is the method for a coffee blancmange thickened with cornstarch. The technique is sound and recoverable, but the quantities have to be reasoned out.
- The missing measurementsOnly "1 teaspoonful butter" and the cornstarch alternative survive intact. The milk, coffee and sugar amounts are lost, and nothing on the page allows an honest reconstruction of them.
- Reading the cornstarch clueThe note that six tablespoonfuls gives a firmer set tells us only that the base quantity was smaller; four or five level tablespoonfuls would both fit. If the scale is a quart of milk-and-coffee, as is common in cornstarch blancmanges, four level tablespoonfuls is a reasonable working figure — but this is inference, not something the page supports.
- Blend cold, alwaysCornstarch must be slurried with cold liquid — here the leftover coffee — before it meets hot milk. Tipped in dry it seizes into lumps that no amount of beating will clear.
- "Scalded milk"Heated to just below boiling, until it steams and shivers at the edge of the pan, around 180F. In the nineteenth century this also served to check raw milk; with pasteurised milk it simply speeds the cooking.
- Why the double boiler, then the direct heatThe gentle five minutes over water cooks out the raw starch taste without scorching. The finish over direct flame is what matters: cornstarch does not reach full thickening power until it actually boils, so it needs a real bubble, briefly, with constant stirring.
- Butter at the endStirred in just before the pudding is taken from the heat, as the recipe directs, it gives gloss and a softer mouthfeel.
- Setting and servingPour into rinsed molds or cups, press plastic film to the surface if you dislike a skin, and chill at least four hours. A quart of blancmange serves six to eight; it is best eaten within two days, as cornstarch gels weep with age.
- The coffeeUse strong brewed coffee, not grounds and not instant. Leftover coffee that has sat on heat turns bitter, and the sugar in the recipe will not disguise it.
Blancmange began as a medieval dish of pounded almonds, capon and rice — literally "white food" — and by the nineteenth century had shed both the meat and, often, the almonds, surviving as a molded milk pudding set with isinglass, gelatine, arrowroot or, increasingly, cornstarch. Commercial manufacture of cornstarch in America dates from the 1840s, and it is often said to have been the cheaper and more reliable option in American kitchens thereafter, producing a pudding that could be turned out of a mold without the expense and unpredictability of gelatine. Its appearance here is the whole point: a cup or two of cold breakfast coffee, which would otherwise be poured away, becomes the flavoring for a dessert, and the pudding is no longer strictly blanc at all. The frugal repurposing of coffee, tea and stale bread was a standing theme of household economy writing in this period, when waste was treated as a moral failing as much as a financial one.