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Dessert

American Blancmange

A custard dessert made with arrowroot, milk, sugar, cinnamon, lemon peel, and laurel water, chilled after baking.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 7 ingredients
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Why it works: Arrowroot and lemon match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 4% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 553 recipes. Both carry coumarin, which smells sweet, hay. The science ↓

American Blancmange

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the arrowroot

  1. Mix cold water with arrowroot and let it settle for 15 minutes.

  2. Pour off the water.

  3. Add laurel water and sugar.

Make the blancmange

  1. Sweeten the milk.

  2. Boil the milk with cinnamon and lemon peel.

  3. Remove the cinnamon and lemon peel.

  4. Pour the boiling milk onto the arrowroot while stirring continuously.

  5. Pour the mixture into a mold and refrigerate overnight.

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. Arrowroot + lemontop 4% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together553 recipes

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

  2. Arrowroot + cinnamontop 4% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together166 recipes

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

  3. Laurel + cinnamontop 4% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together691 recipes

    Shared aroma: cinnamyl acetate (sweet aromatic, cinnamon).

  4. Cinnamon + lemontop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together7,950 recipes

    Shared aroma: beta-phellandrene (minty, terpene).

  5. Laurel + lemontop 10% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together2,239 recipes

    Shared aroma: beta-phellandrene (minty, terpene).

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

What each ingredient does

Arrowroot
Starch that thickens the milk into a smooth, set custard-like texture as it cools.
New milk
Forms the body of the dessert and carries the flavour of the spices and lemon peel.
Sugar
Adds sweetness to balance the milk and the mild flavourings.

The step that matters

Pouring the boiling milk onto the arrowroot while stirring continuously. Starch granules clump if they meet hot liquid without constant stirring, leaving lumps. Steady stirring disperses them so the starch can gelatinise evenly and thicken the milk smoothly.

Swap the arrowroot

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (laurel, sugar, milk, cinnamon, lemon):

  1. Arrowrootthe original
  2. Sweet potatofits about as well
  3. Carrotfits about as well
  4. Capsicumfits about as well

Fit is the average pairing score against laurel, sugar, milk, cinnamon, lemon. Candidates are from the same food group and used in at least 100 recipes.

“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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