blancmange

noun

blanc·​mange blə-ˈmänj  -ˈmäⁿzh 

: a usually sweetened and flavored dessert made from gelatinous or starchy ingredients and milk

Examples of blancmange in a Sentence

Recent Examples on the Web

Queen Charlotte — the new prequel to Rhimes' racy Regency hit — is a lavish, thoughtful expansion of Julia Quinn's saga that goes down as smooth as a fruity blancmange. —Kristen Baldwin, EW.com, 28 Apr. 2023

A Ministry of Silly Walks, a cheeseless cheese shop, a tennis-playing blancmange from space, a fish-slapping dance, a dead parrot, trouble at mill, sketches without punchlines held together by surrealist animation. —Robert Lloyd, chicagotribune.com, 8 Oct. 2020

The upshot, from a few dozen feet away in the daylight, is oddly lumpy, a white blancmange quivering on a tray. —Curbed, 6 Dec. 2022

People even started to replace almond milk with cow’s milk in the classic dessert blancmange. —Joshua Rapp Learn, Discover Magazine, 9 Feb. 2021

The desserts are as pretty as everything else at Sarashina Horii, including a hojicha tea blancmange ($10) and a matcha tiramisù. —John Mariani, Forbes, 14 Apr. 2022

The dish eventually evolved into the notoriously bland European blancmange. —Beth Segal, cleveland, 14 Jan. 2021

The velvety blancmange, made with tofu, has the consistency of panna cotta and the mild flavor of rice pudding. —Jessica Henderson, The New Yorker, 12 July 2019

Some are subtle—in the restaurant’s famous bar room chocolate cake, first developed by pastry chef Albert Kumin, Yosses has replaced its heavy buttercream with chocolate ganache—and others, like his sweet pea and mint blancmange, a bit more bold. —Marley Marius, Vogue, 5 May 2019

Word History

Etymology

shortened from earlier blamanger, blanc-manger, going back to Middle English blamanger, blank manger "dish of chicken, rice, almonds and various spices," borrowed from Anglo-French *blanc manger, for attested blamange (also Old & Middle French blanc mangier, blanc mengier), from blanc "white" + mangier, manger "meal, food," noun derivative of manger "to eat" — more at blank entry 1, manger

Note: There are scattered attestations of the variant without -er from the seventeenth century, though if the form blancmange cited in the Anglo-Norman Dictionary is correct, the variant is much older. The proposal that blanc in the earliest French evidence is actually blant "bland" is not supportable philologically (see T. Scully, The Art of Cookery in the Middle Ages, Boydell, 1995, pp. 207-11). Contrary to Scully's view there is scanty evidence for this word in medieval French, and the only attested sense is "flattering, ingratiating," which is also the oldest sense of Latin blandus, first attested in Plautus. The sense "agreeable to the senses, pleasant, sweet," aside from one possible occurrence in Lucretius, is unattested before Virgil and Ovid. The sense "lacking strong flavor, not stimulating, insipid," as applied to food, which would be most relevant in this context, is a development within English.

First Known Use

1717, in the meaning defined above