Blancmange (, from ) 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 (a source of carrageenan), and often flavoured with almonds. It is usually set in a mould 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 's Bavarian cream, Italian , the Middle Eastern , Chinese annin tofu, Hawai'ian and Puerto Rican . 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. is a sweet contemporary Turkish pudding made with shredded chicken, similar to the medieval European dish. History The origins of the blancmange have long been believed to lie in the introduction of rice and almonds in early medieval Europe by Arab traders. Recently, it has been shown that there have been similar Arab dishes from that period. Variants of the dish appear in numerous European cultures with closely related names including in Italy and in Spain. Additionally, related or similar dishes have existed in other areas of Europe under different names, such as the 13th-century Danish ("white mush"), and the Anglo-Norman ("white Syrian dish"); Dutch (from Latin , "to strain") was known in English as and in French as , and was based on cooked and then strained poultry. The oldest recipe found so far for blancmange is from a copy of the oldest extant Danish cookbook, written by , who died in 1244, which dates it to the early 13th century at the latest. The Danish work may be a translation of a German cookbook, which is believed to have been based on a Latin or Romance vernacular manuscript from the 12th century or even earlier. The "whitedish" (from the original Old French term ) was an upper-class dish common to most of Europe during the Middle Ages and early modern period. It occurs in countless variations from recipe collections from all over Europe and was one of the few truly international dishes of medieval and early modern Europe. It is mentioned in the prologue to Geoffrey Chaucer's Canterbury Tales and in an early 15th-century cookbook written by the chefs of Richard II. The basic ingredients were