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Dessert

Corn Starch Pudding

A sweet pudding made from milk, corn starch, sugar, eggs, and salt.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 6 ingredients
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Why it works: Milk and corn are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 10% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 6,955 recipes. Both carry hexanal, which smells green, grassy. The science ↓

Corn Starch Pudding

Ingredients

Directions

Make the pudding

  1. Scald the milk in a double boiler.

  2. Sift together the corn starch, salt, and sugar, then stir into the milk.

  3. Cook for 15 minutes, stirring until smooth.

  4. Add the slightly beaten egg yolks and cook for an additional 10 minutes.

Serve

  1. Serve hot or cold with cream and sugar.

Recipe from a historical cookbook (Internet Archive).

Transcribed from a scanned cookbook and modernised for today's kitchens. Where the book gave no heat or time, or said "a moderate oven", the temperatures and times here may be modern equivalents rather than the book's own figures.

Explore the science

The flavor team

The pairs that carry this dish. Each one is judged two ways: how much their aromas overlap, and how often cooks already put them together.

  1. Milk + corntop 10% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together6,955 recipes

    Shared aroma: hexanal (green, grassy).

  2. Milk + eggtop 18% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together88,785 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-nonenal (fatty, green).

  3. Milk + sugartop 18% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together77,875 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-nonenal (fatty, green).

  4. Sugar + eggtop 21% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together122,807 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-nonenal (fatty, green).

  5. Sugar + corntop 21% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together7,168 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-nonenal (fatty, green).

Milk and sugar barely smell alike, yet cooks put them together in 77,875 recipes: they work on texture and structure more than aroma.

Ranks compare each pair with 20,000 random ingredient pairs on CompKitchen. How we score pairs

What each ingredient does

Milk
Forms the liquid base that the starch thickens into a pudding.
Corn starch
Thickens the milk as it heats, giving the pudding its body.
Egg yolks
Add richness and help thicken the custard as they cook.
Sugar
Sweetens the pudding and adds body to the mixture.

The step that matters

Adding the egg yolks. Egg yolks can scramble if they meet very hot liquid directly. Stirring in the slightly beaten yolks while the mixture is warm and keeping the heat moderate helps them thicken smoothly without curdling.

“What each ingredient does” and “The step that matters” were written by Claude from this recipe’s own method and reviewed in samples by CompKitchen.

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