Skip to main content
Dessert

Chocolate Mange

A gelatin-based chocolate dessert sweetened with sugar and flavored with vanilla, served with powdered sugar and cream.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
Jump to recipe ↓

Why it works: Milk and vanilla are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 5% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 19,187 recipes. Both carry ethyl caproate, which smells fruity, apple peel. The science ↓

Chocolate Mange

Ingredients

Directions

Make the gelatine

  1. Dissolve the gelatine in cold water.

  2. Boil the milk with the grated chocolate until just scalded.

  3. Pour the dissolved gelatine into the hot milk, sweeten to taste, and boil for 5 minutes.

  4. Remove from heat, add vanilla extract, and pour into moulds.

Serve

  1. Serve with powdered sugar and cream.

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. Milk + vanillatop 5% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together19,187 recipes

    Shared aroma: ethyl caproate (fruity, apple peel).

  2. Chocolate + vanillatop 5% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together10,020 recipes

    Shared aroma: sotolon (curry, maple).

  3. Sugar + vanillatop 8% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together35,032 recipes

    Shared aroma: beta-damascenone (apple, rose).

  4. Sugar + creamtop 9% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together43,450 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2,3-butanedione (butter, sweet).

  5. Chocolate + creamtop 11% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together5,466 recipes

    Shared aroma: delta-decalactone (sweet, creamy).

Sugar and vanilla barely smell alike, yet cooks put them together in 35,032 recipes: they work on texture and structure more than aroma.

Ranks compare each pair with 20,000 random ingredient pairs on CompKitchen. How we score pairs

What each ingredient does

Gelatine
Sets the liquid milk mixture into a firm, wobbly dessert.
Milk
Forms the creamy body of the dessert and carries the chocolate flavour.
Grated chocolate
Gives the dessert its chocolate flavour and a rich, dark colour.

The step that matters

Boiling the gelatine mixture. Gelatine must be fully dissolved before it is added to the hot milk, and the mixture should not be left to cool and set in the pan. Boiling the milk and chocolate only until just scalded avoids scorching and curdling of the milk, which can make the texture grainy.

“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.

You might also like