🏰 Medieval England · compiled c. 1390
Blank Mang is a savory shredded-chicken-and-rice dish from The Forme of Cury, England's 1390 royal cookbook, and the medieval ancestor of the modern blancmange.
Blank Mang (Blomanger) appears in The Forme of Cury, a collection of recipes compiled around 1390 by the Master Cooks of King Richard II — one of the earliest surviving English cookbooks. Despite lending its name to a modern sweet, milky dessert, the 14th-century version was built from shredded cooked chicken or fish, rice, almond milk, and sugar, closer to a savory-leaning rice dish than anything we'd call blancmange now. Almond milk stood in for dairy milk throughout medieval English cooking, in part because it kept without refrigeration and in part because it was suitable on fasting days when dairy was restricted. The sweetness came from sugar, which was a genuine luxury import at the time — a reminder that "sweet" and "savory" weren't opposing categories the way modern menus treat them.
Primary source: The Forme of Cury
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