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Dessert

Corn-Flour Shape

A simple cornflour pudding made by cooking milk, sugar, and cornflour until thickened and set.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 3 ingredients
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Why it works: Corn and milk 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-Flour Shape

Oven, in the book's wordsA slow oven

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the custard

  1. Heat nearly all the milk in a saucepan.

  2. Mix corn-flour and sugar in a bowl. Moisten the mixture with the remaining milk until smooth.

Cook the pudding

  1. Once the milk is very hot, pour the corn-flour mixture into the saucepan. Stir the mixture quickly.

  2. Let the mixture boil. Cook for 10 minutes while stirring constantly.

Set and serve

  1. Dip a mold or basin in cold water. Pour the mixture into the mold.

  2. Let the mixture cool and set. Turn the set pudding out onto a flat dish.

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. Corn + milktop 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. Flour + milktop 14% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together78,219 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

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

    Shared aroma: phenylacetaldehyde (hawthorne, honey).

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

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

Flour and milk 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

Corn-flour
Thickens the milk into a smooth custard as it cooks and sets.
Milk
Forms the liquid base that the corn-flour thickens into a pudding.
Sugar
Adds sweetness to the pudding.

The step that matters

Stirring the corn-flour mixture into the hot milk. Corn-flour clumps if it hits hot liquid unevenly. Stirring quickly while the milk is very hot disperses the starch so it thickens smoothly instead of forming lumps.

“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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