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Dessert

Fruit Blanc-mange

A chilled fruit dessert thickened with corn starch and served 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

Make the fruit juice

  1. Stew the fresh fruit until soft and strain off the juice.

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

Thicken and set

  1. Mix the corn starch with a little cold water and stir it into the boiling juice.

  2. Continue stirring until the mixture thickens and is cooked through.

  3. Pour the mixture into molds that have been rinsed with cold water and let it 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

Fresh fruit
Provides the flavour and colour of the blanc-mange and its juice.
Corn starch
Thickens the juice as it heats, so the mixture sets into a firm, sliceable form when cooled.
Sugar
Sweetens the juice to taste.

The step that matters

Continue stirring until the mixture thickens and is cooked through. Corn starch only thickens fully once it boils and its granules swell. Stopping early or leaving lumps leaves a thin, grainy texture that will not set properly.

“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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