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Chocolate Blanc-Mange
Half box gelatine, soaked till dissolved in as much cold water as will cover it, four ounces sweet chocolate grated, one quart sweet milk, one cup sugar; boil milk, sugar and chocolate five minutes, add gelatine, and boil five minutes more, stirring constantly; flavor with vanilla, put in molds to cool and eat with cream. If wanted for tea, make in the morning; if for dinner, the night before. For a plain blanc-mange omit the chocolate. - Mrs. Dr. Houston, Urbana.
A gelatin pudding of the sort that filled the "Creams and Custards" chapter of every late-nineteenth-century community cookbook. The one thing to change is the boiling: modern gelatin does not want it.
- Half a box of gelatineBoxes of granulated gelatine were not standardised, so this is approximate; half a box is usually read as somewhere between 1/2 and 1 oz, i.e. roughly 2 to 4 envelopes (about 4 to 8 level teaspoons) of powdered gelatin. Two envelopes to a quart gives a jelly firm enough to turn out; more moves it toward a stiff, sliceable set.
- Do not boil the gelatinTen minutes of boiling after the gelatin goes in will degrade it and give a soft or weeping set. Soften it in the cold water, boil the milk, sugar and chocolate as directed, then take the pan off the heat and stir the gelatin in until fully dissolved.
- Sweet chocolateThis means a sweetened eating bar, not unsweetened baking chocolate and not cocoa powder. A dark bar around 45-55% cacao is the closest match; with unsweetened chocolate the cup of sugar is about right, with a sweet bar you may want a third less.
- Sweet milkSimply fresh whole milk, specified to distinguish it from the sour milk or buttermilk called for elsewhere in the book. Whole milk gives the intended body; skim sets thin and chalky.
- Grating the chocolateGrating was the period method of getting a hard bar to melt evenly. Chopping it fine does the same job, and the milk should be warm but not yet boiling when it goes in so it does not seize on the pan bottom.
- Molds and unmoldingRinse the molds with cold water before filling, or brush very lightly with neutral oil. To turn out, dip the mold briefly in hot water and invert onto a chilled plate.
- Chilling timeThe instruction to make it in the morning for tea is sound: allow at least 4 hours in the refrigerator, and overnight for a large single mold. Cover the surface to keep a skin from forming.
- YieldA quart of milk with the sugar, chocolate and soaking water makes rather more than a quart of mixture, so allow a mold of about 1 1/2 quarts, or six to eight individual molds. The cream poured over at table is unwhipped heavy or light cream.
Blanc-mange began as a medieval European dish of pounded almonds thickened with rice or breadcrumbs, and its name is generally traced to the French for "white food." By the time this Ohio-collected recipe appeared, the almonds had largely gone and the dish had become a milk pudding set with cornstarch, arrowroot or, as here, commercial granulated gelatin, which came onto the American market in convenient boxes in the second half of the nineteenth century and made molded desserts possible for a cook without an isinglass kettle or a calf's foot. That the chocolate version is offered first, with "for a plain blanc-mange omit the chocolate" as the afterthought, may hint at how far sweetened eating chocolate had spread into ordinary American households, though a single contributed recipe can bear little weight on that point. The attribution to Mrs. Dr. Houston of Urbana is typical of the book: contributed recipes were credited by married name and town, and the husband's title carried along with it.