Blancmange (French, "white eating") is a sweet dessert popular throughout Europe commonly made with milk or cream and sugar thickened with rice flour, gelatin, corn starch, or Irish moss, and often flavored with almonds.
It is usually set in a mold and served cold. Although traditionally white (hence the name, in English literally "white eating"), blancmanges are frequently given alternative colours. Some similar desserts are French chef Marie-Antoine Carême's Bavarian Cream, Italian panna cotta, the Middle Eastern muhallebi, Chinese annin tofu, Hawai'ian haupia and Puerto Rican tembleque.
Medieval origins
The historical blancmange originated at some time during the Middle Ages and usually consisted of capon or chicken, milk or almond milk, rice, and sugar and was considered to be ideal for the sick. Tavuk göğsü is a sweet contemporary Turkish pudding made with shredded chicken, similar to the medieval European dish. Iranian khoresht mast, which combines chicken with sugar in a saffron-enriched yogurt, is also recognizably a descendant.
The medieval blancmange is still detectable in some regional dishes; in particular note the manjar branco of Coimbra in Portugal, which still contains chicken.