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, wash it well, and pour on a pint of boiling water.
2. Next morning, add a quart of milk and boil it till the isinglass is dissolved; then strain it.
3. Put in two ounces sweet almonds, blanched and pounded.
4. Sweeten it, and put it in the mould.
5. When stiff, turn them into a deep dish, and put raspberry cream around them.
6. For a change, stick thin slips of blanched almonds all over the blanc mange, and dress round with syllabub, nicely frothed.
7. Some moulds require colouring.
8. For an ear of corn, mix the yelk of an egg with a little of the blanc mange and fill the grains of the corn with it;
9. when quite set, pour in the white, but take care it is not warm enough to melt the yellow.
10. For a bunch of asparagus, colour a little with spinach juice, to fill the green tops of the heads.
11. Fruit must be made the natural colour of what it represents.
12. Cochineal and alkanet root pounded and dissolved in brandy make good colouring; but blanc mange should never be served without raspberry cream or syllabub to eat with it.