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Dessert

Fruit Blanc-mange

A fruit dessert thickened with corn starch and served with cream.

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 place it in a double boiler over heat until it boils.

Thicken and set

  1. Mix the corn starch with 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 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).

  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 smooth, sliceable set when cooked and cooled.
Fresh fruit
Provides the main flavour and colour of the blanc-mange.
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 heated to a boil and held there, and it can clump or stay gritty if it is not stirred constantly. Stirring keeps the starch dispersed so it gelatinises evenly, giving a smooth set when it cools.

“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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