No. 3138

Blanc-Mange a la Smolenska

Blanc-Manger a la Smolenska

Soften one ounce of gelatine in cold water and dissolve it in a grill of orange syrup; add to it a pint of filbert milk, made like almond milk (No. 4), substituting filberts for almonds, and strain into a tin basin. Let this preparation become cold on ice, and just as it begins to thicken incorporate about three pints of well-whipped cream. Pour this into a dome-shaped mold, cover with a sheet of paper, close hermetically with a lid, and chill in lightly salted ice. One hour will suffice for this operation. Unmold on a cold dish and serve.

← No. 3137 Cream Biscuit-Small Cold Entremets — Creams, Jellies & Charlottes No. 3139 Strawberry Blanc-Mange →

For the Modern Kitchen

A hazelnut blancmange lightened almost entirely with whipped cream — closer to a modern Bavarian cream than to the stiff cornstarch puddings the name usually suggests. Two things decide whether it works: the temperature of the gelatine base when the cream goes in, and the strength of your gelatine.

"A grill of orange syrup"This is an OCR slip for gill, an old half-cup measure (4 fl oz). Orange syrup here means a heavy sugar syrup flavoured with orange, roughly the consistency of a cordial; a sweetened fresh orange juice reduced slightly does the job.
FilbertsFilberts are hazelnuts. "Filbert milk" is made by the almond-milk method the recipe cites (No. 4): the nuts are blanched and skinned, pounded with a little water, then diluted and strained hard through cloth. Commercial hazelnut milk is thinner and blander than the pounded original.
Gelatine strengthOne ounce (28 g) of nineteenth-century sheet gelatine was not a standardised product and probably had less setting power than an ounce of modern powdered gelatine. For the roughly four pints of finished mixture here, three envelopes (about 21 g) should give a cream that unmoulds cleanly without turning rubbery.
The hinge: catch the base at the right momentChill the gelatine and nut milk only until it thickens to the consistency of raw egg white, then fold in the cream at once. Too warm and the cream deflates and separates into layers; too cold and the base sets in lumps that never disperse.
Whip the cream softAlthough the text says "well-whipped," cream taken only to soft peaks folds into a setting jelly more evenly; stiffly beaten cream tends to give a grainy, streaked interior.
Chilling without an ice caveThe paper, close-fitting lid and salted ice are all there to keep melt water out of the mould and speed the set. A refrigerator does the same work in two to three hours; a mould set in a bowl of ice water, covered with plastic wrap, will match the original hour.
UnmouldingDip the mould in warm water for five or six seconds, dry it, and invert onto a chilled plate. A metal dome mould releases far more readily than ceramic.
YieldA little over two quarts of finished cream — a large dome serving twelve to sixteen at the end of a long dinner.

A Little History

Charles Ranhofer's The Epicurean (1894) records the repertoire of Delmonico's in New York, and its cold entremets section runs to dozens of blancmanges distinguished only by flavouring and garnish — the kind of variation a kitchen needs when it is sending out a different dessert every night for years. Blanc-manger means simply "white food," a name that goes back to medieval European cookery, where the dish was often a savoury-sweet pounded almond and capon preparation before it narrowed to the sweet almond jelly of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Substituting filberts for almonds is a small, characteristic Ranhofer move: same technique, different nut, new number in the book. The suffix à la Smolenska appears to point to Smolensk, and names of this sort were generally applied to flatter a guest or evoke a fashionable Russian association rather than to record any Russian original — French grande cuisine of the period borrowed Russian service and Russian place names freely. The chilling in "lightly salted ice" suggests a kitchen working with ice rather than mechanical refrigeration, the salt bringing the ice below freezing.