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Dessert

Corn-starch Pudding

A sweet pudding made from milk, corn starch, sugar, egg whites, and a little salt, cooked and served chilled.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 5 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

Make the pudding

  1. Heat the milk in a pan or small bucket in a kettle of hot water until boiling.

  2. Add the sugar, then the corn starch dissolved in a little cold milk.

  3. Whip the egg whites to stiff peaks and fold them into the mixture.

  4. Cook for a few minutes, then pour into tea cups, filling them about half full.

Set

  1. Set the cups in a cool place.

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. Milk + eggtop 18% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together88,785 recipes

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

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

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

  4. Egg + sugartop 21% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together122,807 recipes

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

  5. Corn + sugartop 21% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together7,168 recipes

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

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

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

The step that matters

Dissolving the corn starch in cold milk before adding it. Corn starch clumps if added to hot liquid dry or undissolved. Mixing it first with cold milk spreads the granules so they thicken the mixture 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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