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Dessert

Corn-flour Blancmange

A sweet pudding made from cornflour and milk, sweetened and flavored, served with fruit compote.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 5 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 ↓

Corn-flour Blancmange

Ingredients

Directions

Make the blancmange

  1. Mix cornflour with a little cold milk until smooth.

  2. Pour boiling milk over the mixture and return to the saucepan.

  3. Stir constantly and cook for 4 minutes after it boils.

  4. Sweeten and add flavoring to taste.

Set and serve

  1. Pour into a mold and let it cool before turning it out.

  2. Serve with a fruit compote.

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

Cornflour
Thickens the milk into a smooth custard that sets firm as it cools.
Milk
Forms the liquid base that the cornflour thickens into a creamy set dessert.

The step that matters

Stir constantly and cook for 4 minutes after it boils. Cornflour starch thickens only when heated, and stirring keeps it from clumping or scorching on the base of the pan. Cooking through after boiling swells the starch granules fully, so the blancmange sets firm rather than thin or grainy.

“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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