Skip to main content
Dessert

Cornfllour Blancmange

A sweet pudding made from cornflour, milk, sugar, and flavored with bay leaf or cinnamon.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 4 ingredients
Jump to recipe ↓

Why it works: Milk and cinnamon are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 10% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 12,655 recipes. Both carry cuminaldehyde, which smells Spicy, cumin. The science ↓

Cornfllour Blancmange

Ingredients

Directions

Make the blancmange

  1. Mix the cornflour and sugar with a little milk to form a paste.

  2. Heat the remaining milk with the bayleaf or cinnamon until boiling.

  3. Pour the boiling milk onto the cornflour mixture, stirring well.

  4. Return the mixture to the saucepan and boil for 10 minutes, stirring constantly.

  5. Remove the bayleaf or cinnamon, add any additional flavouring, and pour into a wet mould.

Set and serve

  1. Once set, turn out and serve with jam or stewed fruit.

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 + cinnamontop 10% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together12,655 recipes

    Shared aroma: cuminaldehyde (Spicy, cumin).

  2. Sugar + cinnamontop 10% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together30,779 recipes

    Shared aroma: guaiacol (smoky, sweet).

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

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

Sugar and cinnamon barely smell alike, yet cooks put them together in 30,779 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

Brown and poison's patent cornflour
Thickens the milk into a smooth, sliceable set when boiled and cooled.
Milk
Forms the liquid base that the cornflour thickens into a custard-like set.
Sugar
Adds sweetness to the set blancmange.

The step that matters

Stirring the cornflour mixture as it boils. Cornflour starch can clump and scorch on the base of the pan if not stirred constantly. Boiling for the full time fully gelatinises the starch, so the blancmange thickens evenly and sets firm rather than stays grainy or runny.

“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.

You might also like

Cinnamon RollsCinnamon Rolls71 recipesCinnamon CakeCinnamon Cake42 recipesWhite CakeWhite Cake431 recipesPound CakePound Cake373 recipes