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Dessert

Fruit Blanc Mange

Fruit Blanc Mange is a fruit dessert made by stewing fruit, thickening the juice with cornstarch, and serving with cream and sugar.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
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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

  1. Stew the fresh or canned fruit until soft.

  2. Strain off the juice and sweeten to taste.

Make the blanc mange

  1. Place the juice in a double boiler and bring to a boil.

  2. Mix cornstarch with a little cold water and stir into the boiling juice.

  3. Continue stirring until thickened, then pour into molds wet with cold water.

  4. 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 soft, sliceable set when heated and then cooled.
Cream
Adds richness and a smooth, creamy contrast to the tart fruit.
Fresh or canned fruit
Supplies the flavour and colour, and the juice that is thickened into the blanc mange.

The step that matters

Stirring while the juice thickens. Cornstarch must be kept moving as it heats in the boiling juice, so it swells evenly without lumps or scorching on the base. Once it thickens, it sets as it cools.

“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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