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Dessert

Fruit Blanc-mange

A chilled dessert of stewed fruit thickened with corn starch, served with cream and sugar.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 4 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 juice

  1. Stew the fresh fruit until soft.

  2. Strain off the juice and sweeten it to taste.

Make the blancmange

  1. In a separate bowl, mix the corn starch with a little cold water.

  2. Stir the corn starch mixture into the boiling juice.

  3. Continue stirring until the mixture thickens and is cooked.

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

  5. Set the moulds 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).

  2. Sugar + corntop 21% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together7,168 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-nonenal (fatty, green).

  3. Corn + creamtop 25% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together2,532 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-heptanol (bitter, floral).

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

What each ingredient does

Corn starch
Thickens the juice into a set, sliceable blancmange as it cooks and cools.
Fresh fruit
Provides the main flavour and colour, with its juice forming the body of the dessert.

The step that matters

Continue stirring until the mixture thickens and is cooked. Corn starch only thickens fully once it boils and its granules swell and gelatinise. Stopping early leaves a thin, starchy liquid that will not set properly in the moulds.

“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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