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Drink

Buttermilk Pop

A chilled beverage made by boiling buttermilk, thickening with cornstarch, cooling, and optionally sweetening.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 4 ingredients
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Why it works: Buttermilk and sugar match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 9% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 2,973 recipes. Both carry ethanol, which smells alcoholic, ethereal. The science ↓

Buttermilk Pop

Ingredients

Directions

Make the pop

  1. Boil the buttermilk in a double kettle.

  2. Moisten the cornstarch with a little milk and add it to the boiling buttermilk.

  3. Stir well and let it cool.

Serve

  1. Serve cold, with or without 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. Buttermilk + sugartop 9% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together2,973 recipes

    Shared aroma: ethanol (alcoholic, ethereal).

  2. Milk + sugartop 18% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together77,875 recipes

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

  3. Buttermilk + milktop 41% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together9 recipes

    Shared aroma: 1-octen-3-ol (mushroom, earthy).

Milk and sugar barely smell alike, yet cooks put them together in 77,875 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

Buttermilk
Provides the main liquid and tangy dairy flavour of the pop.
Cornstarch
Thickens the boiled buttermilk as it heats, giving the pop a smooth, set body.

The step that matters

Adding the cornstarch to the boiling buttermilk. Cornstarch must be moistened in cold milk first so it disperses evenly. Added dry or in lumps, it clumps and stays grainy. Stirring well while it heats lets the starch swell and thicken the liquid evenly.

“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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