Skip to main content
Dessert

Arrowroot Blanc Mange

A thickened arrowroot dessert made with milk, sugar, and flavoring, chilled in a mold.

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

Why it works: Arrowroot and milk work together. They rank in the top 18% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 817 recipes. Both carry 2-methylbutyraldehyde, which smells malty, chocolate. The science ↓

Arrowroot Blanc Mange

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare

  1. Mix the arrowroot with a little milk in a bowl.

  2. Boil 1½ pints of rich, new milk in a saucepan.

  3. Sweeten and flavor the milk to your taste.

Make and set

  1. Pour the hot milk onto the arrowroot mixture, stirring well.

  2. Cook the mixture over low heat, stirring constantly, until thickened.

  3. Pour the mixture into a jelly 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 + milktop 18% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together817 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-methylbutyraldehyde (malty, chocolate).

  2. Milk + sugartop 18% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together77,875 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-nonenal (fatty, green).

  3. Arrowroot + sugartop 20% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together1,073 recipes

    Shared aroma: 1-penten-3-one (fish, pungent).

Milk and sugar barely smell alike, yet cooks put them together in 77,875 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

Arrowroot
Thickens the milk into a smooth, sliceable set custard as it cooks.
Milk
Forms the body of the blanc mange and carries the flavor.
Sugar
Sweetens the milk to taste.

The step that matters

Cook the mixture over low heat, stirring constantly, until thickened. Arrowroot thickens when its starch granules swell in hot liquid. Heat that is too high or stirring that stops can scorch the milk or leave lumps, and the starch will not thicken evenly.

Swap the arrowroot

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

  1. Sweet potatofits better
  2. Capsicumfits better
  3. Potatofits better
  4. Arrowrootthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against milk, sugar. 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.

You might also like

Arrowroot PuddingArrowroot Pudding46 recipesWhite CakeWhite Cake431 recipesPound CakePound Cake373 recipesOrange Bundt CakeOrange Bundt Cake349 recipes