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Dessert

Corn-starch Pudding

A milk-based pudding thickened with corn starch, sweetened with powdered sugar and served with a currant jelly sauce.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 6 ingredients
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Why it works: Milk and corn 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 ↓

Corn-starch Pudding

Ingredients

Directions

Make the pudding

  1. Reserve ½ cup of milk from the quart.

  2. Heat the remaining milk in a double boiler.

  3. Mix corn‑starch and salt with the reserved milk, then stir into the boiling milk.

  4. Beat well for 2 minutes.

  5. Cover and cook for 12 minutes.

  6. Pour into a pudding dish and cool for 30 minutes.

Make the sauce and serve

  1. For the sauce, beat egg whites to stiff peaks.

  2. Mix in powdered sugar and then add currant jelly.

  3. Serve the pudding with the sauce or with sugar and cream.

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

    Shared aroma: hexanal (green, grassy).

  2. Milk + curranttop 16% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together5,475 recipes

    Shared aroma: isoamyl acetate (banana, pear).

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

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

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

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

  5. Egg + sugartop 21% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together122,807 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 into a smooth, sliceable pudding as it cooks and gelatinizes.
Milk
Forms the liquid base that the starch thickens into the pudding.
Egg whites
Whip into a foam that gives the sauce a light, airy texture.
Currant jelly
Adds sweetness, fruity flavour and colour to the sauce.

The step that matters

Stirring the starch into the boiling milk. Starch clumps if added dry or to milk that is not hot enough. Mixing it first with cold reserved milk and then stirring it into boiling milk helps it disperse evenly and thicken smoothly.

Swap the currant

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

  1. Vanillafits better
  2. Coconutfits better
  3. Figfits better
  4. Currantthe original

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