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Dessert

White Corn Starch Pudding

A sweet pudding made with corn starch, milk, sugar, and egg whites, topped with a custard sauce.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 9 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 ↓

White Corn Starch Pudding

Ingredients

Directions

Make the pudding

  1. Heat 1 pint of sweet milk in a pan over a kettle of hot water until boiling.

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

  3. Dissolve 2 tablespoons of corn starch in a little cold milk.

  4. Add the dissolved corn starch to the mixture.

  5. Whip 3 egg whites to stiff peaks.

  6. Fold the whipped egg whites into the mixture.

  7. Cook for a few minutes.

  8. Pour the mixture into teacups, filling them halfway.

  9. Set aside to cool.

Make the custard

  1. Bring 1 pint of milk to a boil.

  2. Add 3 tablespoons of sugar.

  3. Stir in the beaten egg yolks thinned with 1 tablespoon of milk until thickened.

  4. Flavor with 2 teaspoons of lemon or vanilla.

  5. Let the custard cool.

Serve

  1. Serve each pudding mold in a sauce dish and pour 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

Corn starch
Thickens the milk as it heats, giving the pudding its body and set.
Egg whites
Whipped to stiff peaks, they add airy lightness to the pudding.
Sugar
Adds sweetness to both the pudding and the custard.
Sweet milk
Forms the liquid base that the starch thickens into the pudding.

The step that matters

Thickening the custard. Egg yolks thicken custard by setting as they heat, and they can curdle if the mixture gets too hot or is not stirred. Keep the heat gentle and stir steadily while it thickens.

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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