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Dessert

Blanc Mange

A sweetened milk pudding thickened with cornstarch and set in a mold.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 4 ingredients
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Why it works: Milk and sugar are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 18% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 77,875 recipes. Both carry 2-nonenal, which smells fatty, green. The science ↓

Blanc Mange

Ingredients

Directions

Make the pudding

  1. In a bowl, mix cornstarch with a little cold milk to form a smooth paste.

  2. Bring the remaining milk to a boil.

  3. Stir the cornstarch mixture into the boiling milk.

  4. Sweeten and add flavoring to taste.

  5. Simmer for five minutes, stirring well.

Set and serve

  1. Pour into a wet mold and let it cool.

  2. Serve cold with sugar, cream, or fruit syrup.

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 + 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

Cornstarch
Thickens the milk into a smooth, set pudding as it cooks and cools.
Milk
Forms the liquid base that the cornstarch thickens into the pudding.

The step that matters

Stir the cornstarch mixture into the boiling milk. Cornstarch must be fully dispersed in cold liquid first, then stirred into hot liquid, or it clumps. Stirring while it simmers keeps the starch granules evenly distributed so the pudding thickens smoothly.

“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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