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Dessert

Fruit Blanc Mange

A fruit custard made by stewing fruit, thickening the juice with cornstarch, and serving 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

Make the fruit custard

  1. Stew the fresh or canned fruit and strain off the juice.

  2. Sweeten the juice to taste and heat it in a double boiler until it boils.

  3. Stir in the cornstarch mixed with a little cold water while boiling.

  4. Continue stirring until the mixture is sufficiently cooked.

  5. Pour into molds that have been wet with cold water and 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 boiled juice into a set, custard-like texture as it gelatinises.
Fresh or canned fruit
Provides the juice that forms the base flavour and sweetness of the custard.
Cream
Adds richness and a cooling fat to contrast with the fruit at serving.

The step that matters

Stirring the cornstarch into the boiling juice. Cornstarch must be fully dispersed in cold water first and stirred while the juice boils, otherwise it clumps and does not thicken evenly. It also needs to cook long enough for the starch granules to swell fully, or the custard stays starchy and loose.

“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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