Blancmange

The word ‘blancmange’ derives from the French blanc-manger, meaning ‘white food’. The dish was first recorded in the fourteenth century in a cookery book compiled by chefs working for Richard II. It was then a bland pottage or soup, containing minced boiled capon, sugar, cooked rice and almond milk, and was decorated with red aniseeds or blanched almonds. The recipe changed over the years, as did the name, and by the seventeenth century, as with so many British desse