Take the milk preparation from the refrigerator. Add a few spoons of the whipped cream to the almond blancmange and mix with ahand whisk. The blancmange is perfect for serving at birthday or wedding parties, family gatherings, or entertaining parties. Serve this with macerated berries: mix 4 cups (20oz/568g) fresh or frozen berries (sliced if large) with ½ cup (4oz/115g) granulated sugar. Let sit on the counter for about 45 minutes, stirring occasionally, until the berries have released some liquid and a sweet sauce is formed. It is best to make it the day before it is wanted. Put into a bowl an ounce of isinglass (in warm weather you must take an ounce and a quarter). Pour on as much rose water as will cover the isinglass and set it on hot ashes to dissolve. Blanch one-fourth pound of shelled almonds, (half sweet and half bitter*) and beat them to a paste in a mortar, one at a time, moistening them all the while with a little rose water.

Transfer the blancmange to apastry bagwith the cut tip and push it into glasses/small glass jars. Refrigerate for about 2 hours. Soak half a box of gelatin in a cupful of water for an hour. Boil two cups of milk, then add the gelatin, half a cup of grated chocolate rubbed smooth in a little milk, and one cup of sugar. Boil all together eight or ten minutes. Remove from the fire and when nearly cold, beat into this the whipped whites of three eggs flavored with vanilla. This should be served cold with custard made of the yolks, or sugar and cream. Set the molds in a cold place. If the blancmange is "lumpy" after adding it to the whipped cream, continue to mix gently until it becomes homogeneous. Make sure to mix a little whipped cream with the main preparation before putting it in the whipped cream to incorporate well.

Instructions

Soak half a pound of tapioca in one pint of milk for half an hour, then boil till tender. Add a pinch of salt, sweeten to taste and put into a mold. When cold, turn it out and serve with strawberry or raspberry jam around it and a little cream. Flavor with lemon or vanilla. Gently heat the remaining milk in a large saucepan on low heat. Just before it boils, add in the vanilla extract, sugar and the cornstarch slurry. Storage– Blancmange will last for around 2-3 days in the fridge. You can store separately from the coulis to stop it staining the white blancmange if you like. Keep the blancmange covered to preserve the flavour and stop the top from drying out.

The oldest recipe that can be found is written in Danish, which may have been translated from a German cookbook. Transfer the blancmange to a pastry bag with the cut tip and push it into glasses/small glass jars. Refrigerate for about 2 hours. In one teacup of water, boil until dissolved one ounce of isinglass or of patent gelatin (which is better). Stir it continually while boiling. Then squeeze the juice of a lemon upon a cup of fine, white sugar. Stir the sugar into a quart of rich cream and half a pint of Madeira or sherry wine. When it is well mixed, add the dissolved isinglass or gelatin, stir all well together and pour it into molds previously wet with cold water. Set the molds upon ice, let them stand until their contents are hard and cold, then serve with sugar and cream or custard sauce. Historic cook books provide a reasonable chronology albeit a random selection of texts: Raffald (1769) bases hers on calf’s feet jelly (home made gelatine) but still calls for bitter almonds; Acton (1845), Beeton (1861 & c1902) and Cassell’s (c1890) all ask for isinglass. Isinglass produced a fine, crystal clear gel (it is still used to clarify some wines), but by the end of the C19th century it had given way to the relatively new and convenient ‘instant’ or dried gelatine that emerged with new processing technologies, and many recipes that used isinglass were re-written in gelatine’s favour. Beeton also includes an ‘Arrowroot blancmange’ , a precursor to cornflour blancmange. The Kookaburra cookbook (1912), The Goulburn and The Golden Wattle cookery books (post 1930) all use gelatine. Interestingly the Kookaburra Cookery book recipe is enriched with eggs, rendering it, in the purists’ eyes, a custard pudding rather than a blancmange; the Golden Wattle also includes a ‘Cornflour mould’ which is almost identical to The Commonsense Cookery Book (1914 – 2014 editions) balncmange. The wash-up from all this they are essentially, variations on a sweetened milk pudding with a flavouring of some kind – rose or blossom water, laurel or bay leaves, lemon peel, ‘essence’– almond or vanilla perhaps. Several recipes instruct that you stand the blancmange mould in a shallow basin of iced or cold water until it sets – the coldest water Nina did knew of on a hot summer’s day was a few metres below ground in the well. A clever marketing exercise Sugar– Regular white sugar is fine, sub with brown sugar, coconut sugar or honey if you prefer. We used white sugar in the blanc manger and raw sugar in the coulis for a richer berry flavour.Bring the final touch to the dessert with lime zest and a mint leaf. Why you should try this recipe To serve,pour 1 to 2 tablespoons red fruit coulis on top of the blancmange. Decorate with fresh fruit and serve (photo 6). PHOTO 5 PHOTO 6 Expert tips We still buy cornflour based custard powders (basically sweetened, coloured cornflour) but blancmange powders which were sold in my grandmother’s day have long disappeared. While the cornflour blancmange recipe has survived in The Commonsense Cookery book, blancmanges seem to have slipped from our modern dessert repertoire. The gelatine based blancmange is still with us to some degree, in the richer and more appealingly named Italian panna cotta which uses cream rather than milk, vanilla or other flavouring, and set with gelatine. You can make one large blancmange instead of six small individual blancmanges if you prefer. Simply pour it into a mold or pan of your choice and let set. After all this discussion I decided it was time to road test a couple of blancmange recipes to see why they have dropped off the modern menu – is it simply because they’re regarded as the ‘poor cousin’ to the richer, more stylish panna cotta or bavarois? Or because they became so generic, losing so much of their original mystique, as jelly has, with all the instant shortcuts that have come with technology and industrialised food? Or is it that we can so easily buy ice cream and chilled desserts there’s just no need for home made milk puddings? Nina and her husband ran a dairy at Rouse Hill so enjoyed their own fresh milk, which was probably much richer than the highly processed milk we buy today – its likely that her blancmange was richer and creamier than one we would make today.