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Dessert

Fruit Blanc-mange

A dessert made by stewing fruit, thickening the juice with cornstarch, setting it in molds, and serving with cream and sugar.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 6 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 and strain off the juice.

  2. Sweeten the juice to taste.

  3. Measure the juice and heat it in a pot.

Make the blanc-mange

  1. For every pint of juice, mix 2 heaping tablespoons of cornstarch with a little cold water.

  2. When the juice boils, stir in the cornstarch mixture.

  3. Continue stirring for about 5 minutes until smooth.

  4. Pour the mixture into rinsed molds and set in a cold place to harden.

  5. Once firm, turn out and 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 juice into a smooth, sliceable set when heated and cooled.
Fresh fruit
Provides the flavour and colour of the juice that forms the dessert.
Sugar
Sweetens the juice to taste before it is thickened.

The step that matters

Stirring the cornstarch into the boiling juice. Cornstarch must be fully dispersed in cold water first and then stirred into boiling juice; otherwise it clumps. Continued stirring for about 5 minutes gelatinises the starch evenly so the mixture sets smooth.

“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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