Mrs. Rorer's Chocolate Blanc Mange

I had a hankering to try a new recipe, and had some milk to use up, so I spent way too long looking for a simple blanc mange recipe.  There are a lot of them.  Blanc Mange goes way back to when it was a main dish of rice and chicken cooked in almond milk, to various forms as it changes to become the corn flour/corn starch recipe of today.   There are a lot of mid 19th century recipes using egg whites as an addition, but not necessarily cooked.   I found several fancy recipes for a layered pudding and finally found this simple recipe, for what is basically a moulded chocolate pudding, in a fairly modern form.

Mrs. Rorer's New Cook Book, 1902

This was a simple recipe.  I'll admit I used the microwave instead of a double boiler, but it worked.  

Ingredients -  

1 pint milk (2 cups)

4 tbsp sugar

3 tbsp corn starch or corn flour

2 oz chocolate

chop the chocolate.   Mix the milk and sugar together and stir to dissolve.   Heat until almost boiling and remove 1/2 cup of the milk and set it aside.   Into the small portion of milk, add the corn starch and stir until mixed in completely.   Add the chopped chocolate to the rest of the milk and heat until the chocolate melts, stirring until it is well blended.  Add the milk/cornstarch mixture back into the pot, and heat it up until it thickens and just starts to boil.   Stir constantly so it doesn't burn.   Pour into dishes or a prepared mould.

I used standard bakers chocolate. I think using chocolate rather than cocoa may have helped it firm up to be a mouldable pudding.   If I had to substitute cocoa, I'd add 1 or 2 tablespoons of sugar, and a bit more cornstarch to make up for this.

Using a double boiler minimises the risk of burning, and if you don't have an official double boiler pot, just stick a not melting mixing bowl over a pot of boiling water.   Stainless works well, but a quality glass one should be fine too.  Just don't use plastic.  I used a glass bowl in the microwave.  I set it on high for 3 minutes to heat up, removed the portion of milk and added the chocolate, set it at 1 minute and stirred after each time.  It took less than 3 minutes melt and stir in the chocolate.  I added the reserved milk/cornstarch mixture and heated it for another 2 minutes until it was thick.   If you undercook the cornstarch it will taste a bit raw and starch.  Fully cooked, it's nice, thick and a bit creamy.

Iused little cups for moulds.   This makes about 2.5 cups of pudding, so a proper pudding mould in that size would be very effective for a display piece.   I stuck the cups in the fridge to cool.  It didn't take too long before I could tip the pudding out onto the plate.  I didn't serve it with cream or milk, but a bit of whipped cream on top would be a lovely addition.

It's a nice, simple and easy pudding.  The ability to mould this makes it suitable for a fancy presentation.  Definitely a recipe to use again.

Cookies and my Pepper Harvest

Westfield's theme last weekend was Cookies.  Apparently many other historical villages bake cookies as demo items, because they are pretty easy and appealing.  However it turns out that most of the  Westfield historic cooks cook other things far more often.   This opened up having a village wide theme  of cookies.  It was planned that we'd all make different cookies.   I made hard gingerbread.  Shrewsbury cakes, jumbles, rock cookies and thumbprints were being made throughout the village.   It was a tasty day for sure.  I handed out so many little gingerbread men to visitors that there were only a few left for the staff!

Back at home, I've been working on the garden.  The weather has been perfect, warm enough to not need a jacket, but cool enough to make for easy working.   I've cleaned out the raised bed that had been dedicated to green beans this year.   Then I harvested peppers.  It was a very good year for peppers this year!   I planted sweet banana peppers, jalapeno peppers and some kind of chilli pepper, that I'm pretty sure was mislabeled.   All the plants were very productive and had huge crops of fruit.   The jalapeños were small in size though, and all the hazy skies and clouds reduced the actual sunshine hours which for parts of my garden area, was an issue for actual ripening of the fruit.

I spent the morning threading each of those little hot peppers onto sewing thread to hang them to dry.  I'm not sure why I didn't anticipate how long that would actually take, but I actually turned on the tv and watched 1.5 episodes of Vera while I dutifully threaded the peppers individually onto the thread.  They're hanging in the kitchen now.   I'm packaging some peppers for my kids when we get together on the weekend.  It seems appropriate to share my garden bounty on our Thanksgiving.  

Tomorrow I'm going to harvest the last of the herbs.   I have some chives, parsley and a huge amount of leaf celery or soup celery.  I priced out dehydrators today but right now they are out of my price range, so I'll have to air dry the herbs.    

My son brought in the lemon tree yesterday.  It's so weird that we've still had lovely weather this late into the autumn.   While there hasn't been any frost warnings yet, the low temperatures for the next 3 days are supposed to hover just barely above freezing, which means at the very least patchy frost.  Getting the rest of the garden harvested before then just means less work of covering all the plants at night to protect them.