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Dessert

Corn-starch Hasty Pudding

A quick pudding made by thickening scalded milk with corn starch, butter, and salt.

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. Scald the milk in a saucepan and add the salt.

  2. Wet the corn-starch in a small amount of cold milk, then stir it into the scalded milk.

  3. Boil steadily for 15 minutes, stirring occasionally.

  4. Add the butter and let the pudding stand in hot water, uncovered, until ready to serve.

Serve

  1. Serve in an open, deep dish with cream and sugar.

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. Milk + corntop 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 into a smooth pudding as it cooks and swells in the liquid.
Fresh milk
Forms the liquid base that the starch thickens into the pudding.
Butter
Adds richness and a softer mouthfeel to the finished pudding.

The step that matters

Wet the corn-starch in cold milk before adding it. Starch added directly to hot liquid clumps, because the outer grains swell and seal before the inside can hydrate. Mixing it into cold milk first disperses the grains so the pudding thickens smoothly.

“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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