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Dessert

Fruit Blanc Mange

A fruit dessert thickened with cornstarch, served with cream.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 5 ingredients
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Why it works: Sugar and cream are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 9% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 43,450 recipes. Both carry 2,3-butanedione, which smells butter, sweet. The science ↓

Fruit Blanc Mange

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the fruit juice

  1. Stew the fresh or canned fruit.

  2. Strain off the juice.

  3. Sweeten the juice to taste.

  4. Heat it in a double boiler until it boils.

Make the custard

  1. Mix the cornstarch with a little cold water.

  2. Stir the mixture into the boiling juice.

  3. Continue stirring until the mixture is sufficiently cooked.

  4. Pour the mixture into molds that have been wet with cold water.

  5. Set aside to cool.

Serve

  1. Serve with cream and sugar.

Recipe from a historical cookbook (Internet Archive).

Transcribed from a scanned cookbook and modernised for today's kitchens. Where the book gave no heat or time, or said "a moderate oven", the temperatures and times here may be modern equivalents rather than the book's own figures.

Explore the science

The flavor team

The pairs that carry this dish. Each one is judged two ways: how much their aromas overlap, and how often cooks already put them together.

  1. Sugar + creamtop 9% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together43,450 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2,3-butanedione (butter, sweet).

Ranks compare each pair with 20,000 random ingredient pairs on CompKitchen. How we score pairs

What each ingredient does

Cornstarch
Thickens the fruit juice into a set custard when heated and cooled.
Fresh or canned fruit
Provides the main flavour and colour of the custard.
Sugar
Sweetens the juice and balances its tartness.

The step that matters

Stirring the cornstarch into the boiling juice. Cornstarch must be fully dispersed in cold water first and stirred into boiling liquid, or it clumps. Continued stirring while cooking lets the starch granules swell and thicken evenly before the mixture sets.

“What each ingredient does” and “The step that matters” were written by Claude from this recipe’s own method and reviewed in samples by CompKitchen.

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