Skip to main content
Dessert

Fruit Blanc Mange

A fruit dessert made by thickening fruit juice with cornstarch, then served with cream and sugar.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 4 ingredients
Jump to recipe ↓

Why it works: Cream and sugar 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 juice

  1. Stew the cherries, cranberries, or raspberries and strain off the juice.

  2. Sweeten the juice and boil it in a water bath.

Thicken and set

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

  2. Cook until thickened, then pour into a mold.

  3. 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. Cream + sugartop 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 boiling juice into a set, sliceable gel as it cooks.
Fruit juice
Provides the main flavour and liquid that the cornstarch thickens.
Sugar
Sweetens the juice and balances the fruit's tartness.
Cream
Adds richness and a cool, creamy contrast to the fruit.

The step that matters

Stirring cornstarch into the boiling juice. Cornstarch must be fully dispersed in cold water before it goes into hot juice, or it clumps. Starch granules swell and thicken only once heated, so the mixture needs to cook until it visibly thickens to 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.

You might also like

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