Skip to main content
Dessert

Fruit Blanc-mange

A chilled fruit dessert thickened with cornstarch and served with cream.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 5 ingredients
Jump to recipe ↓

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 fruit

  1. Stew the fresh fruit until soft.

  2. Strain off the juice and sweeten to taste.

Make the blancmange

  1. Place the juice in a double boiler and heat until boiling.

  2. Mix the cornstarch with cold water and stir into the boiling juice.

  3. Continue stirring until thickened, then pour into molds rinsed with cold water.

Serve

  1. Let cool 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

Fresh fruit
Provides the main flavour and colour, and the juice that sets into the blancmange.
Cornstarch
Thickens the hot juice into a smooth, sliceable set as it cooks and cools.
Sugar
Sweetens the juice to taste and balances the fruit's tartness.

The step that matters

Continue stirring until thickened. Cornstarch must be stirred while it heats in boiling liquid; stirring keeps it dispersed and prevents lumps, and it only reaches full thickening once boiling is sustained.

“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

White CakeWhite Cake431 recipesPound CakePound Cake373 recipesOrange Bundt CakeOrange Bundt Cake349 recipesSpice CakeSpice Cake344 recipes