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Dessert

Corn Starch Pudding

A pudding made by thickening milk with corn starch and vanilla.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 4 ingredients
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Why it works: Milk and vanilla are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 5% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 19,187 recipes. Both carry ethyl caproate, which smells fruity, apple peel. The science ↓

Corn Starch Pudding

Ingredients

Directions

Make the pudding

  1. Mix corn starch with cold milk and beat until smooth.

  2. Slowly stir this mixture into hot milk in a double boiler, stirring constantly to prevent lumping.

  3. Cook for fifteen minutes.

  4. Add vanilla and serve hot.

Serve

  1. Alternatively, pour into molds.

  2. Serve cold with sugar and cream.

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 + vanillatop 5% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together19,187 recipes

    Shared aroma: ethyl caproate (fruity, apple peel).

  2. Corn + vanillatop 9% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together1,943 recipes

    Shared aroma: ethyl cinnamate (sweet, balsamic).

  3. Corn + milktop 10% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together6,955 recipes

    Shared aroma: hexanal (green, grassy).

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 set body.
Cold milk
Dissolves the corn starch so it can be stirred into the hot milk without clumping.
Hot milk
Forms the liquid base that the starch thickens into a creamy pudding.

The step that matters

Stirring the starch into the hot milk. Corn starch clumps when it meets hot liquid before its granules are dispersed. Adding it slowly while stirring constantly keeps the granules separate so they swell evenly and thicken the milk smoothly.

Swap the vanilla

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

  1. Vanillathe original
  2. Coconutfits about as well
  3. Figfits less well
  4. Cherryfits less well

Fit is the average pairing score against corn, milk. 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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