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Arrowroot Blanc Mange

A sweet milk pudding thickened with arrowroot and sugar.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 4 ingredients
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Why it works: Milk and arrowroot work together. They rank in the top 18% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 817 recipes. Both carry 2-methylbutyraldehyde, which smells malty, chocolate. The science ↓

Arrowroot Blanc Mange

Ingredients

Directions

  1. Mix the arrowroot with a little cold water to form a paste.

  2. Bring the milk to a boil.

  3. Stir the arrowroot paste into the boiling milk.

  4. Add sugar and mix well until thickened.

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 + arrowroottop 18% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together817 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-methylbutyraldehyde (malty, chocolate).

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

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

  3. Arrowroot + sugartop 20% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together1,073 recipes

    Shared aroma: 1-penten-3-one (fish, pungent).

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

Arrowroot
Thickens the milk into a smooth, set pudding as it gelatinizes with heat.
Milk
Forms the liquid base and provides richness and body to the pudding.
Sugar
Adds sweetness and balances the flavor of the milk.

The step that matters

Stirring the arrowroot paste into the boiling milk. Arrowroot must be fully mixed into smooth paste first and stirred in evenly so it does not clump. Adding it to hot liquid while stirring lets the starch swell and thicken uniformly.

Swap the arrowroot

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (milk, sugar):

  1. Sweet potatofits better
  2. Capsicumfits better
  3. Potatofits better
  4. Arrowrootthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against milk, sugar. Candidates are from the same food group and used in at least 100 recipes.

“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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