Skip to main content
Dessert

Cornfllour Blancmange

A sweet dessert made from cornflour, milk, sugar, and lemon rind or cinnamon, set in a mould.

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

Why it works: Arrowroot and lemon match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 4% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 553 recipes. Both carry coumarin, which smells sweet, hay. The science ↓

Cornfllour Blancmange

Ingredients

Directions

Make the blancmange

  1. Boil the milk with the lemon rind.

  2. Blend the cornflour with a little cold milk until smooth.

  3. Pour the boiling milk onto the cornflour mixture.

  4. Return the mixture to the saucepan.

  5. Boil gently for six minutes, stirring constantly.

  6. Remove the lemon rind and add the sugar.

Set and serve

  1. Set the mixture in darioles or a mould rinsed with cold water.

  2. Once firm, loosen the edges, shake, and turn it out onto a 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. Arrowroot + lemontop 4% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together553 recipes

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

  2. Milk + lemontop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together19,053 recipes

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

  3. Arrowroot + milktop 18% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together817 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-methylbutyraldehyde (malty, chocolate).

  4. Sugar + lemontop 18% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together53,532 recipes

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

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

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

Sugar and lemon barely smell alike, yet cooks put them together in 53,532 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

Cornflour or arrowroot
Thickens the milk as it heats, giving the blancmange its set and smooth body.
Milk
Forms the liquid base that the starch thickens into a creamy custard.
Castor sugar
Adds sweetness and softens the flavour of the set blancmange.

The step that matters

Boil gently for six minutes, stirring constantly. Starch granules only swell and thicken fully once heated to a boil. Stirring prevents lumps and scorching on the base, and the cooked starch must be cooked long enough to set firmly when cooled.

Swap the arrowroot

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

  1. Arrowrootthe original
  2. Sweet potatofits about as well
  3. Capsicumfits less well
  4. Asparagusfits less well

Fit is the average pairing score against milk, sugar, lemon. 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.

You might also like

Lemon CakeLemon Cake228 recipesLemon IceLemon Ice147 recipesLemon SherbetLemon Sherbet103 recipesLemon CustardLemon Custard64 recipes