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Dessert

Fruit Blanc Mange

A fruit custard made by stewing fruit, thickening the juice with cornstarch, and setting it in molds.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 5 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 fresh fruit of your choice and strain off the juice.

  2. Sweeten the juice to taste and heat it in a double boiler until boiling.

Thicken and set

  1. Mix 2 tablespoons of corn starch with a little cold water, then stir it into the boiling juice.

  2. Continue stirring until the mixture thickens, then pour it into cold water-wetted molds.

  3. Let it cool before serving 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 as it heats, forming a gel that sets the custard once cooled.
Fresh fruit
Provides the main flavour and the colour of the juice that becomes the custard.
Sugar
Sweetens the juice and balances the tartness of the fruit.

The step that matters

Stirring the starch into the boiling juice. Starch lumps if added without first being mixed smooth in cold water, and it must be stirred while the juice boils so it gelatinises evenly and thickens. Continued stirring prevents scorching and keeps the texture smooth.

“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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