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Dessert

Cornfllour Blancmange

A custard-like dessert made from cornflour, milk, sugar, and bay leaf, served with jam or fruit.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 4 ingredients
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Why it works: Arrowroot and milk work together. They rank in the top 18% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 817 recipes. Both carry 2-methylbutyraldehyde, which smells malty, chocolate. The science ↓

Cornfllour Blancmange

Ingredients

Directions

Make the blancmange

  1. Mix the cornflour smoothly with a little milk.

  2. Boil the rest of the milk with the bay leaf and let it infuse for 10 to 15 minutes.

  3. Stir in the blended cornflour and cook gently for 5 minutes.

  4. Remove the bay leaf, add the sugar, and pour into a mould rinsed with cold water.

Serve

  1. Serve with jam, stewed fruit, or fruit syrup.

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

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

  2. Sugar + milktop 18% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together77,875 recipes

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

  3. Arrowroot + sugartop 20% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together1,073 recipes

    Shared aroma: 1-penten-3-one (fish, pungent).

Sugar and milk 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

Cornflour
Starch swells when heated, thickening the milk so it sets into a firm custard.
Milk
Liquid base that gives the blancmange its body, softness and creamy flavour.
Castor sugar
Adds sweetness and softens the flavour of the set blancmange.

The step that matters

Cooking the blended cornflour. The starch must be stirred in smoothly and cooked gently until the mixture thickens. Undercooked cornflour leaves a raw floury taste and a weak set, while stirring prevents lumps.

Swap the arrowroot

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

  1. Sweet potatofits better
  2. Capsicumfits better
  3. Potatofits better
  4. Arrowrootthe original

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

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