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Dessert

Corn-starch Pudding

A sweet pudding made with corn starch, milk, and egg whites, served with a lemon or vanilla custard sauce.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 8 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. Heat the sweet milk in a pan with a kettle of hot water until boiling.

  2. Add the sugar to the boiling milk.

  3. Dissolve the corn-starch in a little cold milk and add it to the mixture.

  4. Whip the egg whites to stiff peaks and fold them into the mixture.

  5. Cook for a few minutes.

  6. Pour the mixture into teacups, filling them halfway, and set in a cool place.

Make the custard

  1. Bring 1 pint of milk to a boil for the sauce.

  2. Add 3 tablespoons of sugar to the boiling milk.

  3. Whisk the beaten yolks with 1 tablespoon of milk and stir into the boiling milk until thickened.

  4. Flavor the custard with 2 teaspoons of lemon or vanilla and let it cool.

Serve

  1. Serve the pudding in a sauce dish for each person and pour the custard over it.

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

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

  3. Milk + lemontop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together19,053 recipes

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

  4. Sugar + lemontop 18% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together53,532 recipes

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

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

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

Sugar and lemon barely smell alike, yet cooks put them together in 53,532 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

Sweet milk
Forms the liquid base that the starch thickens into a soft set.
Corn-starch
Thickens the hot milk as its granules swell, giving the pudding body.
Egg whites
Whipped and folded in, they add a light, airy texture to the pudding.
Sugar
Sweetens the pudding and the custard.

The step that matters

Cook the cornstarch mixture fully. Cornstarch only thickens once the mixture is heated enough for its starch granules to swell and gelatinize. Stopping early leaves the pudding thin and can leave a raw starchy taste.

Swap the lemon

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

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

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