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Dessert

Corn-starch Pudding

A custard-like pudding made from milk, corn starch, eggs, sugar, butter, and flavored with lemon or vanilla.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 8 ingredients
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Why it works: Milk and butter are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 7% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 81,283 recipes. Both carry (z)-4-heptenal, which smells biscuit, cream. The science ↓

Corn-starch Pudding

Ingredients

Directions

Make the custard

  1. Heat 1 quart of milk in a saucepan until boiling.

  2. Reserve a small amount of cold milk to dissolve 3 tablespoons of corn-starch.

  3. Dissolve the corn-starch in the reserved cold milk.

  4. Once the milk boils, stir in the dissolved corn-starch, a pinch of salt, and a walnut-sized piece of butter.

  5. Remove the saucepan from heat.

  6. Stir the mixture until it cools.

  7. Add the yolks of 3 or 4 eggs.

  8. Add a scant teacup of pulverized sugar.

  9. Flavor the mixture with lemon or vanilla.

Bake and serve

  1. Fold in the stiff-beaten egg whites last.

  2. Pour the mixture into a porcelain pudding dish.

  3. Bake the pudding.

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 + buttertop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together81,283 recipes

    Shared aroma: (z)-4-heptenal (biscuit, cream).

  2. Corn + walnuttop 9% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together349 recipes

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

  3. Walnut + lemontop 10% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together2,149 recipes

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

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

    Shared aroma: hexanal (green, grassy).

  5. Corn + lemontop 13% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together1,927 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-nonenal (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, sliceable pudding as it gelatinizes with heat.
Egg yolks
Add richness and help set the custard as they cook and firm up.
Egg whites
Whipped into foam, they lighten the pudding and give it a airy rise in the oven.
Milk
Forms the liquid base that the starch thickens and the eggs enrich.
Pulverized sugar
Sweetens the pudding and softens the set texture slightly.

The step that matters

Fold in the stiff-beaten egg whites last. Folding gently keeps the whipped foam from deflating, so the pudding stays light and rises in the oven instead of turning dense.

Swap the walnut

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

  1. Almondfits better
  2. Walnutthe original
  3. Lima beansfits about as well
  4. Beansfits about as well

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