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Cocoanut Corn Starch Pudding

A coconut pudding thickened with corn starch and sweetened with sugar, set in a mold.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 5 ingredients
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Why it works: Corn and coconut match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 5% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 306 recipes. Both carry decanal, which smells soap, orange peel. The science ↓

Cocoanut Corn Starch Pudding

Ingredients

Directions

Make the base

  1. Bring the milk to a boil in a saucepan.

  2. Once boiling, add the corn starch that has been wet with a little milk.

  3. Stir until the mixture thickens.

Finish and set

  1. Quickly fold in the beaten egg whites, sugar, and coconut.

  2. Pour the mixture into a mold and let it set.

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. Corn + coconuttop 5% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together306 recipes

    Shared aroma: decanal (soap, orange peel).

  2. Milk + coconuttop 10% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together2,648 recipes

    Shared aroma: delta-dodecalactone (sweet, creamy).

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

    Shared aroma: hexanal (green, grassy).

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

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

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

Corn starch
Thickens the milk as its granules swell and gelatinize when heated.
Milk
Forms the liquid base that the starch thickens into a pudding.
Egg whites
Add air and body when beaten and folded in, giving a lighter set.
Sugar
Adds sweetness and softens the flavor of the pudding.
Shredded coconut
Adds coconut flavor and a chewy, textured bite.

The step that matters

Adding the corn starch to boiling milk. Dry starch clumps when it hits liquid, so wetting it with a little milk first lets the granules disperse evenly. Stirring while the mixture heats lets the starch swell and thicken smoothly instead of forming lumps.

Swap the coconut

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

  1. Vanillafits better
  2. Coconutthe original
  3. Figfits about as well
  4. Peachfits less well

Fit is the average pairing score against milk, corn, sugar, egg. 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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