[Sca-cooks] Recipe evolution

[Phil Troy / G. Tacitus Adamantius]

Also sprach Harris Mark.S-rsve60:
>Huette commented:
>>>>>>>
>There was a big shift in how people cooked during
>the mid-seventeenth century.  Recipes changed and
>new ones were created.  One example is
>blancmange.
>During period, blancmange was a dish of chicken,
>rice, almonds and other ingredients.  You can
>find blancmange in modern cookbooks, but it isn't
>the same recipe anymore.  Today's blancmange is a
>gelatin dessert flavored with milk or almond milk
>and other ingredients, but the chicken and rice
>are no longer in evidence.  To make a modern
>blancmange and serve it as a period dish would be
>wrong bacause the name may be the same, but the
>dish isn't.
><<<<<
>This is an interesting example of recipe evolution. I'm afraid I'm 
>not that familiar with blancmange, though.
>
>Was this a sudden change in the mid 17th century? Or a gradual 
>change over time? Over perhaps a gradaul change can be documented 
>with a sudden shift in the 17th century? Do we have enough 
>blancmange recipes to track this? I don't remember blancmange being 
>a recipe that has been addressed here much.

Sure you do... blankmanger? Blomanger? "A White Dish of Capon"? We've 
talked about all of them here.

For whatever reason (it might have to do with the increased 
availability of sugar in the 16th century on, especially with the 
introduction of beet sugar processing) the seventeenth century seems 
to be (more or less) the swan song of the medieval tendency to 
combine sugar with foods that would otherwise be savory. As the 
concept of the banquetting table grew, we saw not only an increased 
sugar usage, but more sugar-preserved foods, and fewer savory dishes 
with sugar sprinkled on top, or with sugar used as a seasoning. (They 
were still there, but probably not as common, and by the eighteenth 
century there began to be fairly distinct groups of sweet and savory 
dishes.) Blancmange has simply survived as a dessert, with the white 
and sweet aspects surviving, and the poultry or fish, the rice, and 
sometimes, the almonds being lost.

I don't suppose I should hold out any hopes you'd remember the Python 
sketch about the Evil Blancmanges from Outer Space, who were trying 
to win the Wimbledon tennis tournament?

Adamantius