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Dessert

Corn-starch Hasty Pudding

A quick pudding made from corn starch, milk, butter, and salt, served with butter, sugar, or cream and nutmeg.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 4 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 Hasty Pudding

Ingredients

Directions

Make the pudding

  1. Wet the corn-starch with a little water.

  2. Heat the milk to scalding.

  3. Stir the corn-starch into the hot milk and boil for 10 minutes until thick and smooth.

  4. Add salt and butter, then let the pudding stand in a hot water bath for 3 minutes.

Serve

  1. Turn the pudding into a deep dish and serve with butter and sugar, or powdered sugar and cream, with grated nutmeg on top.

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

    Shared aroma: hexanal (green, grassy).

  3. Corn + buttertop 14% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together7,345 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2,3-pentanedione (butter, sweet).

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 as its granules swell and gelatinize in the hot liquid.
Milk
Forms the liquid base and adds body and richness to the pudding.
Butter
Adds fat for a smoother, richer mouthfeel and flavor.

The step that matters

Boil until fully thick. Cornstarch granules must reach a full boil and be cooked long enough to swell and set. If undercooked, the pudding stays thin and can taste starchy or raw.

“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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