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Dessert

Four Minute Pudding

A quick milk pudding made with corn starch, eggs, and milk, boiled for four minutes.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 4 ingredients
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Why it works: Corn and milk 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 ↓

Four Minute Pudding

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the custard base

  1. Dissolve the corn starch in a small amount of milk.

  2. In a bowl, mix the dissolved corn starch with salt and beaten eggs.

  3. Heat the remaining milk in a container set in hot water.

Cook and serve

  1. Add the corn starch mixture to the heated milk and stir briskly.

  2. Boil for 4 minutes or until thickened.

  3. Serve with a liquid sauce.

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 + milktop 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. Corn + eggtop 26% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together7,484 recipes

    Shared aroma: (e)-2-octenal (fatty, green).

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 into a smooth pudding as it heats and gelatinizes.
Milk
Forms the liquid base that the starch thickens into a creamy pudding.
Eggs
Add richness and help set the pudding as it thickens.

The step that matters

Stir briskly when adding the corn starch mixture to the hot milk. Stirring keeps the starch evenly dispersed so it thickens smoothly instead of forming lumps where it hits the hot milk. Starch swells and thickens only once it heats, so the mixture must be kept moving as it comes up to a boil.

“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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