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Blanc-Mange
Dissolve three heaping table-spoons corn starch and three of sugar in one pint of milk; add to this three eggs well beaten, and pour the mixture into one pint of boiling milk, stirring constantly until it boils again; just before taking from the stove flavor to suit the taste and pour into cups or small molds; when cool take out and place on a glass dish with a mold of jelly in the center. Serve a spoon of jelly and a sauce of sweetened cream with each mold. Or, put one quart milk (reserving three table-spoons with which mix three heaping table-spoons corn-starch) with a pinch of salt and five table-spoons sugar. When milk is hot, pour in the mixed cornstarch, and stir until it is a thick batter; pour this on the wellbeaten whites of four eggs, add two tea-spoons vanilla, pour into molds wet in cold water, and set on ice; when cold, turn from the mold, and serve in a custard made as follows: Put one pint milk in a basin over boiling water, mix in a tea-cup two even tea-spoons corn-starch in two of cold milk, beat in the four yolks of eggs and two and a half table-spoons of sugar. When the milk is hot pour part of it into the cup and stir well, pour it back into the basin and stir until as thick as desired; put on ice until chilled thoroughly. Blanc-mange may be colored green with spinage juice, or pink with the juice of strawberry, currant or cranberry, or a handsome yellow with the grated peel of an orange or lemon, moistened with the juice and strained through a cloth. Very pretty half-pint molds may be made as follows: Tilt the mold in a pan of snow or pounded ice, color one-fourth the blanc-mange pink, another fourth green; wet the molds and pour into them a little of the colored blancmange, putting only one color into each mold and filling it so that when tilted the blanc-mange reaches nearly to the top and covers about two-thirds of the bottom; when cold set mold level, and fill with the white blanc-mange, which has, meantime, been kept in so warm a place as not to harden. If the molds are made to imitate roses or fruit, the fruit may be green, and roses pink; if corn, yellow; and various ways of combining colors and forms will suggest themselves to the ingenious housewife.
Two versions of a cornstarch blancmange, plus a stirred custard sauce and instructions for layered colored molds. Nothing here is dangerous; the difficulty is that the measurements are loose and the setting time is unstated.
- The hinge: bring it back to a full boilCornstarch only reaches full thickening power once it actually boils, and a starch-and-egg mixture that merely steams will set soft and taste raw. Stir constantly over medium heat until it bubbles thickly, then give it another 30 seconds.
- "Heaping table-spoons"Three heaping tablespoons of cornstarch works out to somewhere between 1/4 and 1/3 cup, roughly 35-45 g — measure by weight if you want repeatability, since a heaping spoon varies considerably depending on the hand. Two pints of milk thickened with that much starch should give a mold firm enough to turn out and stand on its own.
- Flavoring goes in off the heatVanilla and citrus oils are volatile; adding them "just before taking from the stove" is right, since prolonged boiling drives the aroma off.
- The custard sauce needs a thermometer, not a boilThe second sauce is a thin egg custard cooked over boiling water. Take it to 175-180F and no further; above that the yolks curdle and no amount of stirring brings them back. The small amount of cornstarch in it is insurance against exactly that.
- "Set on ice"Read this as the refrigerator. Half-pint molds need about 3 to 4 hours to set firm, and overnight does no harm if covered so a skin does not form.
- Wetting the moldsRinsing the mold in cold water and pouring it out, rather than oiling it, is deliberate: the thin film of water lets the set pudding release cleanly without greasing the surface. To unmold, dip the base in warm water for a few seconds and invert onto a chilled plate.
- Natural coloringsSpinach juice gives a grey-green that dulls quickly and carries a faint vegetal taste; berry and currant juices thin the mixture and shift it toward pink-grey rather than bright pink. Reduce the added juice from the milk if you use much of it, or accept a softer set.
- YieldEither version fills six to eight half-cup molds. The whites-only version is lighter and whiter; the whole-egg version is richer and closer to a set custard.
The name is Old French for "white eating" or "white dish," and the ancestor of this pudding is medieval rather than Victorian: a thickened almond-milk preparation, often with shredded capon in the savory versions, stiffened with rice flour or ground almonds. By the nineteenth century blancmange had become firmly a sweet, set either with isinglass and later gelatin, with arrowroot, or — as here — with cornstarch, which American manufacturers were producing on a commercial scale from the 1840s onward and which took its place alongside the costlier thickeners in household cookery, where gelatin and arrowroot versions continued as well. Its appearance in The Dixie Cook Book reflects that shift: an old aristocratic dish rebuilt around a cheap boxed pantry starch. The elaborate closing instructions for tilting molds in pounded ice to make two-tone roses and ears of corn belong to the same period taste for shaped, colored table pieces that produced the ornamental jelly and ice-cream molds sold by the dozen in Victorian kitchenware catalogues.