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Dessert

Corn-starch Pudding

A simple pudding made by thickening milk with corn starch, optionally flavored with sugar, lemon or vanilla, and served hot or cold.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 7 ingredients
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Why it works: Lemon and nutmeg match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 5% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 11,318 recipes. Both carry beta-phellandrene, which smells minty, terpene. The science ↓

Corn-starch Pudding

Ingredients

Directions

Make the pudding

  1. In a pot, bring 1 quart of milk to a boil, reserving ½ cup to mix with the corn starch.

  2. In a bowl, mix the corn starch with the reserved cold milk and salt.

  3. Once the milk boils, add the corn starch mixture and beat well.

  4. Cook for 12 minutes, stirring constantly.

Flavor and serve

  1. For added flavor, mix in sugar and lemon or vanilla extract, or nutmeg, after removing from heat.

  2. Alternatively, stir in bright jelly just before serving.

  3. Serve hot or cold with sugar and milk.

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. Lemon + nutmegtop 5% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together11,318 recipes

    Shared aroma: beta-phellandrene (minty, terpene).

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

    Shared aroma: hexanal (green, grassy).

  3. Corn + nutmegtop 10% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together563 recipes

    Shared aroma: estragole (anise, licorice).

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

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

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

Milk
Forms the body of the pudding as the starch thickens it when heated.
Corn starch
Thickens the milk into a smooth, set pudding as it cooks.
Sugar
Adds sweetness to the finished pudding.

The step that matters

Mix the corn starch with cold milk before adding it. Corn starch clumps if it meets hot liquid directly. Blending it into cold milk first keeps it dispersed so it thickens smoothly when added to the boiling milk.

Swap the lemon

The recipe marks lemon as optional. How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (milk, corn, sugar, nutmeg):

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

Fit is the average pairing score against milk, corn, sugar, nutmeg. 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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