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Dessert

Corn Starch Pudding

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

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 10 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 sweet milk in a tin pail with hot water until it reaches boiling point.

  2. Add the sugar to the boiling milk.

  3. Dissolve the corn starch in a little milk and add it to the mixture.

  4. Beat the egg whites to stiff peaks and fold them into the mixture.

  5. Cook the mixture for a few minutes.

  6. Pour the mixture into cups, filling them about half full.

Make the sauce

  1. Bring 1 pint of milk to a boil for the sauce.

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

  3. Add the thinned egg yolk (mixed with 1 tablespoon of milk) to the sauce.

  4. Stir the sauce until it thickens.

  5. Flavor the sauce with Coleman's extract.

Serve

  1. Pour the sauce over each pudding mold just before serving.

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. Sugar + saucetop 13% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together5,147 recipes

    Shared aroma: ethanol (alcoholic, ethereal).

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

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

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

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

  5. Egg + sugartop 21% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together122,807 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 into a soft, set pudding as it cooks.
Egg whites
Beaten to stiff peaks, they add lightness and airy structure to the pudding.
Egg yolk
Enriches the sauce and helps it thicken smoothly when stirred.
Sugar
Sweetens the pudding and the sauce.

The step that matters

Folding in the egg whites. Whites should be beaten to stiff peaks and folded gently so the air is kept; deflating them makes the pudding dense rather than light.

“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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