Biancomangiare

From Mrs Beeton

'Biancomangiare' sounds so much more exotic than 'blancmange' or 'cornflour mould' but, although it might have become nursery fodder and is now something of an anachronism, I like to think that blancmange is more than a mere 'cornflour mould'.
My researching of the history of blancmange began a while back but this post was prompted by a recent piece on The Cook and the Curator  which talked about blancmange being set with gelatin, and how the mould was chilled to get the mixture to set.
The blancmange I know, which my mother made, comes from the Good Housekeeping Cookery Book of 1949 where it goes by the unfortunate name of 'cornflour mould' and involves nothing more than milk, thickened with cornflour and flavoured with lemon rind and sugar.
Blancmange has a long history, it was ubiquitous in European cookery from as early as the twelfth century. According to the Oxford Companion to Food  blancmange is the Anglicized version of blanc manger which simply means 'white food' (although there is some debate about this, see Hieatt and Allaire-Graham references below) and in the 14th- and 15th- century English blancmangers were made of shredded chicken breast, sugar, rice and either ground almonds or almond  milk. Unlikely as this idea sounds the Turkish dessert tavuk göğsü (which is certainly made with chicken breast but doesn't always contain rice and is more usually made with cow's milk) is still popular and delicious, and these days something of a tourist attraction. 
Although it appears there is no hard and fast proof that blancmange or tavuk göğsü  have their roots in medieval Arab cuisine it seems highly likely. Barbara Santich in her The Original Mediterranean Cuisine (Wakefield Press, 1995) says of blanc manger

this is one of the great classics of medieval cuisine, an international dish of high repute. All the recipe collections contain at least one recipe for blanc manger or menjar blanch. Its basic ingredients are ground rice or rice flour, milk or almond milk, sugar and rosewater...To these might be added shredded chicken breast, or fish or lobster in Lent.

In Delizia! The epic history of Italians and their food John Dickie talks about De honesta voluptate et valetudine  - Respectable Pleasure and Good Health (1465) the first printed cookbook. Written in Latin and authored by 'Platina' the Vatican librarian under Pope Sixtus IV, most of the recipes in this book originated from a professional cook, one Martino de Rossi. His version of biancomangiare (which Dickie translates as 'white eating') consists of peeled almonds and the boned breast of a capon pounded to a pulp and cooked with spices and sugar. Blancmanges like this were apparently often poured over meat and were highly prized, 'to achieve the desired degree of whiteness, it was prepared with particular attention to cleanliness, sometimes in a separate corner of the kitchen.'

This illustration from Opera di Bartolomeo Scappi *(reproduced from Dickie) shows a Renaissance kitchen, with pies being prepared on the the long central table, sauces being sieved in the right foreground and the lone blancmange-maker on the left.

The Oxford Companion to Italian Food says that the popularity of  biancomangiare was 'its unearthly and expensive whiteness'.

Using white meat, ..., carefully prepared to retain its palor, and white forms of starch and sugar, biancomangiare would have glowed with the luminosity of a full moon among the sombre stews and sauces, the deep browned roasts, decorated with gold and silver, and the brightly coloured tarts, pies, and sauces of the banquet table. Like white linen and the ethereal pale complexion of a pampered princess, this delicate dish speaks of conspicuous consumption and a flagrant use of costly commodities.  

Gosh! 

Searching through the modern recipe books on my shelves, Claudia Roden  (A New Book of Middle Eastern Food) gives recipes for balouza (made with cornflour and water, flavoured with orange blossom or rose water with blanched almonds or pistachios) which she says is 'like white opaline encrusted with little stones' which 'trembles like a jelly'. Balouza Muhallabia is made with milk rather than water and the nuts are used as a garnish. In Moroccan Cuisine Paula Wolfert  includes a dessert called Mulhalabya which is made in much the same way and garnished with blanched almonds and cinnamon. In Anissa Helou's Lebanese Cuisine the dish is muhallabuyeh.
Mary Taylor Simeti (Sicilian Food) says that blancmange has been a Sicilian favourite for centuries and  likely arrived in Sicily with the Arabs. The 15th-century recipe she reproduces is very similar to that described in Santich, using ground almonds and veal or chicken broth (to make a savoury almond milk), rice flour, sugar, cooked chicken meat pounded to a paste and flavoured with sugar, rosewater  and served with 'a sprinkling of sweet powdered spices'. In Sicily the modern blancmange is made with cow's milk or almond milk and cornflour.
Whilst it might not speak of conspicuous consumption or glow in the dark I still like to think of 'cornflour mould' as a direct descendant of Medieval biancomangiare.

So where does the gelatin come in? The early blancmanges made from a good chicken or veal stock would have owed some of their viscosity to the gelatin extracted from the bones during the making of the stock but this was clearly supplemented with the pounded chicken flesh and starch of some sort, if indeed the intention was to produce a set blancmange rather than just a warm, thick goo. The thick goo would of course have set  to some extent once it cooled. Until gelatin made from bones was commercially available, around the middle of the 19th-century, making a jelly involved calves feet and a long and tedious process of boiling and straining and clarifying. Isinglass, gelatin prepared from the dried swim bladders of fish, was commercially available  from the late 18th-century (and is still used today as a clarifying agent in the production of wine and beer).** It follows that recipes calling for the use of either isinglass or gelatin would most probably date from the 19th-century.
According to the Larousse Gastronomique,  Carême  said of  blancmanges that 'these delicious sweets are greatly esteemed by gastronomes, but, to be enjoyed, they must be extremely smooth and very white'.
His recipe calls for almond milk that is filtered and strained and gelled with isinglass. Similarly both Eliza Acton and Isabella Beeton writing in the later half of the 19th-century also use isinglass.
Acton (Modern Cookery) does include a recipe for making blancmange using calves foot stock, cream or milk and finely pounded almonds but also includes recipes requiring isinglass. Of isinglass she has this to say

At many Italian warehouses a preparation is now sold under the name isinglass, which appears to be a highly purified gelatine of some other kind. It is converted without trouble into a very transparent jelly, is free from flavour, and is less expensive than the genuine Russian isinglass

Russian isinglass was made from the swim bladders of sturgeon. She has recipes for 'good common blanc-mange, or blanc-manger'; a richer blancmange made with cream; a strawberry blancmange 'or Bavarian cream'; quince, apricot and currant blancmanges; and a 'jaumang' or 'jaune manger' which apparently was also know as 'Dutch flummery' and incorporated eggs.*** All these versions are set with isinglass.
Mrs Beeton provides recipes for blancmange made with isinglass using almonds,  milk and cream and recommends flavourings from bay-leaves to Maraschino and Curacao; a cheap blancmange made with milk and set with gelatin and a blancmange for invalids set with isinglass neither of which involve almonds. She also notes that

A nice blancmange, if wanted quickly, can be made by using the powders prepared by Goodall, Backhouse and Co., or Yeatman. A blancmange for children may be made of Brown and Polson's Corn-flour.

From 1956 http://www.flickr.com/photos/totallymystified/8576176743/

Using isinglass or gelatin then is perhaps a more refined, middle-class, modern approach to blancmange. But not without its pitfalls. At least with cornflour you know whether or not you have used enough to get the mixture to thicken to the right consistency. Setting with gelatin requires the right ratio of gelatin to liquid and the texture of the resultant gel depends on both the concentration of gelatin and the speed with which the gel forms. Cooling the liquid quickly results in a more fragile gel,  the gel formed at room temperature is more stable. More worrying is that the gel will start to breakdown if the temperature goes above around 30 degrees C, which may not have troubled mesdames Acton and Beeton but can be a problem in an Australian summer. And for my money the texture and mouth-feel of a blancmange made with cornflour is superior. Call me a philistine but I'm happy to stick with my 'cornflour mould' especially since it's really biancomangiare.

For a much more detailed and scholarly look at the history of and debate about blancmange see Erin Allaire-Graham 'From Fast to Feast: Analyzing the ubiquitous "White Dish"' and Constance B. Hieatt 'Sorting through the titles of Medieval dishes: What is, or is not, a "Blanc Manger"'.

* Of Bartolomeo Scappi, Dickie says he 'was undoubtedly the greatest cook of the Italian Renaissance'. His Opera, published in 1570 in six volumes, is 'a comprehensive cookery guide, and a meticulously illustrated monument not just to one exceptionally successful career but to the careers of those hundreds of nameless cooks who had brought Italian food to such heights.' There is more about the Opera here and see the original here. If you follow the links in this post you can also sample the translation and Deanna also includes a couple of his recipes.

**My favourite reference to isinglass is from the stage show 'Oklahoma'. 'The Surrey with the fringe on top' has wheels that are 'yeller', brown upholstery, a dashboard of genuine leather and 'isinglass curtains y'can pull right down, in case there's a change in the weather'.

*** Eliza Acton's 'Jaune Manger' required 8 egg yolks and was flavoured with the juice of 'four sound moderate-sized lemons' and a pint of sherry. In Delizia! Dickie describes a 'Yellow Neapolitan-style blancmange' from 1529 which involved almonds, boiled capon breast and sugar worked to a smooth consistency and then mixed with rice flour, cinnamon and ginger  and coloured with saffron. This was 'tempered with meat or capon broth and cooked with verjuice'. Cinnamon and sugar were added on top before serving.

Eating in Berlin

Food isn't perhaps the most compelling reason for visiting Berlin. It is a fascinating city with more than its fair share of wonderful museums and a modern history which resonates in one way or another with everyone but when it comes to eating most tourists probably think cabbage, potatoes and wurst. And probably the worst of the wurst is the one that gets the most publicity - currywurst. Supposedly, at least as far as Berliners are concerned, invented by one Herta Heuwer using ingredients available in the British zone after the end of World War Two the currywurst is nothing more than a sausage drowned in tomato sauce with curry powder sprinkled on top, served with chips.

 Irina Dumitrescu ('Currywurst', Petits Propos Culinaires, 98, July 2013, pp.71 - 77) says of currywurst that 'any sane non-German, with properly calibrated taste buds and a sense of the limits to which innovation in food should be taken' naturally recoils from the idea of eating one. Yet it is so much a part of the popular culture in Berlin that there is a museum dedicated to currywurst - imaginatively named Deutsches Currywurst Museum - and there is even a novel about the invention of curry wurst which you can read about here (and an interesting article 'Beyond Currywurst and Döner: The Role of Food In German Multicultural Literature and Society' by Heike Henderson which discusses this work, which you can read here.) Dumitrescu sees currywurst 'as a symbol of troubled German national consciousness in the post-war period', a sign of 'the kind of creative chaos cities like Berlin ... foster so well' and a 'riff on traditional food that keeps it squarely in the middle, even if unrecognisable'. Be that as it may for a whole variety of reasons currywurst holds a significant place in the local food culture, encapsulating memories and tradition for those who can read the message.

 In the interests of gastronomic tourism it was necessary to try this concoction but not at a street stall or at the Currywurst Museum but, perhaps more fittingly, at the Domklause restaurant attached to the DDR Museum.The DDR (Deutsche Demokratische Republik) Museum is all about what life was like in East Germany, and rather than stuffy static exhibits it provides an interactive experience. For example you can wander around a typical apartment - sit in a mock-up of a typical lounge room, rummage through the cupboards in the kitchen and fondle the clothes in the wardrobe. You can also sit in an interrogation room and a prison cell and participate in a rigged election. Along the way the museum answers a good many questions and provides some understanding of what  East Berlin was all about. The Domklause restaurant completes the picture by serving food which was popular in East Germany.

The museum is on the site of the exclusive Berlin Palashotel (1979 - 1992), home of the original Domlkause where official visitors, western tourists and DDR officials wined and dined in style. The present Domklause serves some of the dishes the hotel patrons would have enjoyed such as Erich Honecker's favourite meal (smoked pork, potatoes and sauerkraut) alongside more plebeian fare such as Ketwurst (hotdogs), Krusta (pizza) and Grilletta (hamburgers). The Rationalisierungs- und Forschungszentrum Gaststätten or Gastronomic Rationalisation and Research Centre was responsible for the development of these fast food products specially engineered to give the citizens of the East their own version of the taste of the West untainted by hints of capitalism. Given the choice the East German ketwurst is a better bet than the West German currywurst in my opinion but eating currywurst here posed a thought provoking link between life in the east and the privations of life in the west immediately after the war.  Dumitrescu points out that currywurst was essentially just an inventive way of making the substandard sausage available at the time into something more palatable. Using German sausage, American ketchup, the British contribution of Anglo-Indian curry powder, and French fries a serve of currywurst was West Berlin on a plate.

Whilst the DDR museum is very informative and the restaurant food is fun there is something a little disturbing about the whole experience. Since the project is geared towards western tourists it is heavy with the suggestion that the DDR was both a serious mistake and a bit of a joke, clearly doomed to failure. West was, is and will continue to be, best. There's a sense that this very recent past is all ancient history without any real acknowledgment that in fact Berlin is full of people who have had personal experience of the way of life on display in the museum. For them the difficulties of a life lived in fear of the Stasi, with no political freedom and little consumer choice is balanced by memories of happy family times, of growing up, of friendships, of holidays, of comradeship and purpose. Many people who have lived under a communist regime are not entirely convinced that their lives are suddenly 100 per cent better now that they live in a democracy.

In Berlin they talk of Ostalgie, which is literally nostalgia for the east, for those aspects of their culture like consumer goods, food products included, which disappeared overnight. East Germans essentially became immigrants in their own country, with a yearning for those everyday markers of their identity. Since the 1990s there has been a boom in nostalgia and companies manufacturing products formally only ever available to residents of the DDR. The Original Ketwurst stand at Friedichstrasse station (see also here) is but one example of the places specialising in food nostalgia. Vita Cola (which you can sample at the Domklause) and Spreewald pickles are available again. There is even a game called 'Kost the Ost' (Taste the East) based on cards featuring 46 different DDR food brand labels (only three of which are still available), 10,000 of which were sold in the first week of its release in late 1996. (For more information, if your German is up to it, see here. This site is also the source of the pictures of the cards.)

 'In this business of Ostalgie, East German products have taken on new meaning when used the second time around. Now stripped of their original context of an economy of scarcity or an oppressive regime, these products largely recall an East Germany that never existed. They thus illustrate the way in which memory is an interactive, malleable, and highly contested phenomenon, but also the process through which things become informed with a remembering - and forgetting - capacity.'

 Quoted from Daphne Berdahl, '"(N)Ostalgie" for the Present: Memory, Longing and East German Things' in  On the social life of postsocialism. Memory, Consumption, Germany. Indiana University Press, Bloomington, 2010 which you can, and should, read here. These comments might just as well apply to currywurst.

The wall which once separated east from west, or what is left of it, is now also a tourist attraction. The Berlin Wall Memorial tells the story of how the wall came about and the role it played in people's lives.  Bits of the wall still exist in various parts of the city. Chunks turn up in odd places as street art.

 This recent article is a reminder of how using the Berlin Wall as a canvas began, not all that long ago.

And to be fair there probably is more to German food than currywurst, cabbage and potatoes. Although I haven't seen this publication myself there is a new book due soon, if not already available, called Beyond Bratwurst. A history of food in Germany by Ursula Heinzelmann, published by Reaktion Books which promises a broader spectrum of culinary delights.