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Cornflour Pudding

A custard-like pudding made from cornflour, milk, sugar, eggs, and spices, baked until set.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 7 ingredients
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Why it works: Cinnamon and nutmeg match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 11,917 recipes. Both carry estragole, which smells anise, licorice. The science ↓

Cornflour Pudding

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare

  1. In a bowl, mix 4 tablespoons of cornflour with 1 tablespoon of cold milk until smooth.

  2. In a saucepan, combine the remaining milk, 3 tablespoons of powdered sugar, and the cinnamon stick or bay leaf.

  3. Heat the saucepan over medium heat until the milk boils.

Make the custard

  1. Once boiling, pour the milk mixture into the cornflour mixture, stirring continuously until smooth.

  2. Add 2 beaten eggs to the mixture and mix lightly.

Bake and serve

  1. Grease a quart pie dish with butter.

  2. Pour the mixture into the pie dish and sprinkle ½ teaspoon of grated nutmeg on top.

  3. Bake in a preheated oven at 400°F (200°C) for 30 minutes.

  4. Serve warm.

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. Cinnamon + nutmegtop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together11,917 recipes

    Shared aroma: estragole (anise, licorice).

  2. Milk + buttertop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together81,283 recipes

    Shared aroma: (z)-4-heptenal (biscuit, cream).

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

    Shared aroma: cuminaldehyde (Spicy, cumin).

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

    Shared aroma: guaiacol (smoky, sweet).

  5. Milk + nutmegtop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together14,685 recipes

    Shared aroma: eucalyptol (eucalyptus, herbal).

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

Cornflour
Thickens the milk into a smooth, set pudding as it is heated.
Milk
Forms the liquid base that the cornflour thickens and the eggs enrich.
Eggs
Add richness and help the pudding set as it bakes.
Powdered sugar
Adds sweetness and dissolves easily into the warm milk.

The step that matters

Stirring the milk into the cornflour mixture. Cornflour thickens only when starch granules are fully hydrated and heated, so pouring in the boiling milk while stirring constantly prevents lumps. Stirring continuously keeps the starch dispersed so the custard turns smooth rather than clumpy.

“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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