Other forms: blanched, blanching, blanches
To blanch is to go pale, or to plunge food briefly in boiling water. Blanch at the sight, blanch the beans, blanched almonds.
The cooking sense is a short boil followed by cold water, which sets the colour, loosens skins and stops the cooking exactly where you want it — it is the step before freezing vegetables. Of a person it means going white with shock. Note that the French means to whiten.
1verbblanchTo plunge food briefly in boiling water.
“Blanch the green beans in boiling water, then drop them into iced water.”
2verbpaleTo go pale with shock.
“She blanched when she saw the size of the bill.”
blanch is a whitening.
Old French blanchir comes from blanc, white, from a Frankish word. Blank and blanket come from the same whiteness.
Old French
blanchir
Middle English
blaunchen
English, today
blanch
From Middle English blaunchen, from Old French blanchir, from Old French blanc (“white”), from la-eme blancus, from Frankish blank, from Proto-Germanic blankaz (“bright, shining, blinding, white”), from Proto-Indo-European bʰleyǵ- (“to shine”). 2 Cognate with blench (“to deceive, to trick”) through Proto-Indo-European, whence other etymology of blanch.
Etymology from Wiktionary, CC BY-SA
Practised in A Song of Ice and Fire