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Dessert

Fruit Blanc Mange

A fruit dessert thickened with cornstarch and served with cream.

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 juice

  1. Stew the fresh or canned fruit until soft.

  2. Strain off the juice and sweeten to taste.

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

Thicken and set

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

  2. Continue stirring until the mixture thickens.

  3. Pour into molds that have been wet with cold water and let 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 hot juice into a gel-like body as it cooks and then sets when cooled.
Fruit
Provides the main flavour and colour of the dessert.

The step that matters

Continue stirring until the mixture thickens. Cornstarch must be stirred while the juice is boiling so the starch granules swell evenly and gelatinize; stopping early or leaving it unstirred can leave lumps or a thin, unset dessert.

“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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