Jaune Mange

You have all heard of blancmange – the dish literally translated as ‘eat white’ that once upon a time (in the Medieval era) was the pale and elegant fusion of chicken, almond milk, and fragrant spices which somehow over the centuries morphed and degenerated into the artificially coloured and flavoured chilled gelatine and cornflour ‘thing’ served at children’s parties.

Perhaps, like me, you have never heard of jaune mange (eat yellow) before? I love it when ignorance is exposed. Especially my own. I came across the phrase somewhere in my recent wanderings, and want to share my findings with you.

Without searching exhaustively, the first reference I came across is in Charlotte Mason’s The Lady’s Assistant for Regulating and Supplying Her Table, in 1777.

Charlotte gives general directions on how to colour blancmange green (juice of spinach), red (cochineal, steeped in a bit of brandy), and yellow (saffron). She also gives a specific recipe for Jaune Mange – a delicious sounding orange custard set with isinglass (the old-fashioned gelatine).


Jaune Mange.
Boil one ounce of isinglass in three quarters of a pint of water, till melted, strain it; add the juice of two Seville oranges, a quarter of a pint of white wine, the yolks of four eggs beaten and strained, sugar to the taste; stir it over a gentle fire till it just boils up; when cold put it into a mould or mould: if there should be any sediment, take care not to pour it in.

Quotation for the Day.

Chopsticks are one of the reasons the Chinese never invented custard.
Spike Milligan.

Amber Pudding.

It goes without saying that colour is important in food. As far as vegetables are concerned, nutritionists tell us that the intensely-coloured varieties are especially good for us. As far as cooked dishes are concerned, cooks and chefs everywhere know that some colours attract and some repel. Last October we explored the themes of red, yellow, blue, and green food, and I was reminded of this when I got briefly diverted by Amber Pudding while I was deciding over yesterday’s recipe. It was rejected on the day, because it did not contain ambergris, but it is too delicious to reject utterly. Recipes for Amber Pudding appear regularly in nineteenth century cookbooks, the name coming from its beautiful golden-amber colour, which in turn comes from the butter, egg yolks, and candied orange it contains.

Golden-coloured food seems particularly appealing. Is there some sort of inherited attraction because of the long association with the ripe, golden grains that have been staple foods for our species for millenia? Or is it just a potato chips and custard thing?

Amber Pudding seems worthy of re-discovering, perhaps in the form of little tartlets for the petits fours platter at your next dinner party?


A Very Fine Amber Pudding.
Put a pound of butter into a sauce-pan, with three quarters of a pound of loaf sugar finely powdered; melt the butter, and mix well with it; then add the yolks of fifteen eggs well beaten, and as much fresh candied-orange as will add colour and flavour to it, being first beaten to a fine paste. Line the dish with paste for turning out; and when filled with the above, lay a crust over, as you would, a pie, and bake in a slow oven. It is as good cold as hot.
A new system of domestic cookery, by a Lady (M.E. Rundell) 1808

Quotation for the Day.

Custard: A detestable substance produced by a malevolent conspiracy of the hen, the cow, and the cook.
Ambrose Bierce, The Devil's Dictionary (1906)

From the Orient.

I (and my lovely daughter) are in Thailand this week. Shopping and Eating. It seems appropriate then, to give you something with an Eastern flavour.

Mrs Woolley from last week was silent on the subject of the Orient, which is not surprising for a woman born in the early seventeenth century. A hundred years later however, knowledge of the outside world was pressing in on England, and the author of  Domestic economy, and cookery, for rich and poor(1827), known at the time only as “A Lady”, had quite a comprehensive chapter on “Oriental Cookery.”

She starts by saying:

“WE are accustomed to look to the East for the origin of arts and sciences. I am not, however, inclined to ascribe the invention of cookery to Brahma or Visnu, nor do 1 feel myself so far implicated in its honour as to fall out with the heathen of old for not elevating to a niche in the Pantheon a deity that has, in these latter ages, found so many worshippers. The art of cookery; more than any other, depends upon local circumstances, as it is with the greatest difficulty communicated from one country to another, the natural productions of the soil requiring to be transported, as well as the modes of dressing them. In the early emigrations, the people must have been shepherds to abandon their native country without very great inconvenience; in their progress to husbandry and civilisation, they would adopt peculiar fashions of their own, from chance or necessity. The styles of the different nations might be thus various, though much on a par with respect to quality; and, although that of one country might surpass the rest, the others, not admitting of any general standard, could not possibly adopt it or profit by it. Travellers, while they might communicate unknown sciences, against which there could be no very rooted prejudice, or discoveries in known ones, which would be received with avidity, not only would have found it impossible to introduce improvements in this art, but would also have had to divest themselves of the deepest rooted of all prejudices. …

She then finds a recipe to illustrate her point:

“On opening Dr. Hunter's Culina accidentally, at the last page (quite in the oriental style), I was not a little pleased at finding the following admirable receipt, so different from the English style; there being some obsolete words in it, he has thus rendered it …”  

A delicious Dish,
Take good cow's milk and put it into a pot; take parsley, sage, hyssop, savory, and other good herbs; chop them and stew them in the milk; take capons, and after half roasting them, cut them in pieces, and add to them pines [pine nuts], clarified honey, and salt; colour with saffron, and serve up.

The Lady goes on to say:

“Nothing but prejudice could call any thing in this receipt disgusting. This dish is completely Turkish. The sweet herbs (the milk is in the Arab style), the saffron, the capons, the making of which is a constant practice in the East, and of which we have no trace among our nations anterior to the time of the Crusades; but, above all, the sweets, the honey, and the pine kernels, which arc richer and stronger than almonds, and must have been imported, as they never bear fruit more towards the north than the 43°, all proved to me that our travelled forefathers had not been proof against the dainties of the East. The dish I have tried, and, even without capons, I can affirm that it well merits its title.”

And then:

“But what was my surprise, on turning the page for the connexion, to read as follows: “Whoever looks into the 'Forme of Cury,' as compiled about 400 years ago, by the master cook of Richard the Second, will he highly disgusted with the dishes there recorded. Much, therefore, is due to those who have brought forward the culinary manners of the present age, in opposition to the nauseous exhibitions of former times. For example:” then follows (will the reader believe me ?) the above-mentioned ‘Delicious Dish’ ”

The author is referring to a dish (or one of a number of dishes) that are a fore-runner of our modern blancmange, or “white eat”, - one variety being called Blank Dessire or Blank de Sur, meaning “white dish from Syria”.

For to make Blank de Sur.

Take the zolyks of Eggs sodyn and temper it with the mylk of a kow and do thereto Comyn and Safron and flowr’ of ris or wasted bread myced and grynd in a morter and temper it up with the milk and make it boyle and do thereto wit of Egg corvyn smale and take fat chese and kerf ther’to wan the liquor is boyld and serve it forth.

Form of Cury, circa 1390.

A recipe for Blanc Maunger, also from the Form of Cury, is HERE.

Quotation for the Day …

I prefer to regard a dessert as I would imagine the perfect woman:  subtle, a little bittersweet, not blowsy and extrovert.  Delicately made up, not highly rouged.  Holding back, not exposing everything and, of course, with a flavor that lasts.  Graham Kerr.