Flip through a medieval cookbook and you certainly will find a recipe for blanc manger, which means ‘white dish’ or ‘white food’. The dish was so named because all its ingredients were white. The basic ingredients that appear in most recipes are rice, blanched almonds, sugar, and chicken breast or capon (castrated rooster). During Lent, the chicken is absent from the dish. Medieval chefs were very creative with the dish in terms of flavours, structure, decoration, and even colour.
Off-white
In addition to sugar, ginger is often used in four colours. The ‘chicken pudding’ had a white part, a yellow part, a blue part, and a red part. Colouring food was very common in luxury households in the Middle Ages. Saffron and egg yolk were used for a yellow or gold colour; for a green colour, the juice of parsley was taken; a red or purple colour often came from alkanet (alkanna tinctoria); and so on.
