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Preserve

Corn Starch Pudding

A sweet pudding made with milk, corn starch, flour, sugar, egg whites, lemon juice, and salt.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 7 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

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

  2. Add sugar. Mix corn starch and flour with a little cold milk, then add to the boiling milk.

  3. Fold in beaten egg whites and cook for 1-2 minutes.

  4. Remove from heat, add flavoring, pour into cups to mold, filling them halfway.

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 + flourtop 13% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together6,165 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

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

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

  4. Milk + flourtop 14% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together78,219 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  5. Flour + sugartop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together92,116 recipes

    Shared aroma: phenylacetaldehyde (hawthorne, honey).

Milk and flour barely smell alike, yet cooks put them together in 78,219 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

Egg whites
Beaten whites fold in to add airy lightness and some structure as they set with heat.
Corn starch
Swells in hot milk and thickens the mixture into a smooth, sliceable pudding.
Flour
Adds additional thickening alongside the corn starch, giving body to the pudding.
Sugar
Sweetens the pudding and balances the flavor of the milk.

The step that matters

Adding the starch mixture to boiling milk. Corn starch must be fully mixed into cold milk first so it does not clump. It then needs to boil to swell and thicken properly, so the pudding sets smooth instead of lumpy.

Swap the lemon

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

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

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