Blanc Mange

History

Mary Randolph's The Virginia House-Wife (1824) prints a 'Blanc Mange' set with isinglass: 'Break one ounce of isinglass into very small pieces; wash it well, and pour on a pint of boiling water; next morning, add a quart of milk, boil it till the isinglass is dissolved, strain it, put in two ounces sweet almonds, blanched and pounded; sweeten it, and put it in the mould'. Blanc mange belongs to a long European tradition of 'white dishes'; the name is French — blanc plus manger — reading roughly as 'edible white'. In its medieval form it was savoury, 'an almond and rice stew served with chicken or fish'; it shifted from savoury to sweet around 1600–1604, and by the eighteenth century had 'turned into a dairy-milk pudding flavoured with bitter or sweet almonds' — the form Randolph records. The setting agent she specifies, isinglass, 'is made from the dried swim bladders of fish' and was a standard blancmange gelling agent of the era (Acton 1845, Beeton 1861, Cassell's c1890 all call for it) before dried gelatine displaced it. The record does not document who first made blanc mange in Virginia, nor any specific social meaning it carried in the Tidewater region.

Ingredients

• 1 ounce isinglass
• 1 pint boiling water
• 1 quart milk
• 2 ounces sweet almonds
• sugar
• raspberry cream
• blanched almonds
• syllabub
• egg yolk
• spinach juice
• cochineal and alkanet root
• brandy

Instructions

1. Break one ounce of isinglass into very small pieces and wash it well. Pour one pint of boiling water over it and let sit overnight.
2. The next morning, add one quart of milk to the isinglass mixture and boil until the isinglass is completely dissolved. Strain the mixture.
3. Add two ounces of blanched and pounded sweet almonds to the strained liquid. Sweeten to taste.
4. Pour the mixture into a mould and allow it to set until stiff.
5. Turn the moulded blanc mange out into a deep dish and surround with raspberry cream. Serve with raspberry cream or syllabub.
6. For variations: the blanc mange may be garnished with thin slips of blanched almonds stuck all over it and dressed with frothed syllabub. For fancy moulds shaped like corn, mix the yolk of an egg with a little blanc mange to fill the grain indentations, then carefully pour in the white portion once the yellow is set, taking care the white is not warm enough to melt the yellow. For asparagus-shaped moulds, colour a portion with spinach juice to fill the green tops of the heads. Fruit-shaped moulds should be coloured naturally to represent their fruit—cochineal and alkanet root pounded and dissolved in brandy make effective colouring agents.