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Dessert

Corn-Flour Blanc-mange

A custard dessert made with milk, corn-flour, sugar, and a bay leaf or lemon peel, served with jam.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 5 ingredients
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Why it works: Tea and lemon work together. They rank in the top 8% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 610 recipes. Both carry 3-hexenal, which smells apple, fruity. The science ↓

Corn-Flour Blanc-mange

Ingredients

Directions

Make the blancmange

  1. Bring 3 cups of milk with a bay leaf or lemon-peel to a boil in a saucepan.

  2. Mix corn-flour with the reserved cold milk in a teacup.

  3. Add loaf sugar to the boiling milk.

  4. Pour in the corn-flour mixture, stirring continuously for 10 minutes.

  5. Remove the bay leaf or lemon-peel.

Set and serve

  1. Pour the mixture into a mold or teacups.

  2. Once cooled, turn out the blanc-mange.

  3. Add jam around it and serve.

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. Tea + lemontop 8% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together610 recipes

    Shared aroma: 3-hexenal (apple, fruity).

  2. Milk + corntop 10% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together6,955 recipes

    Shared aroma: hexanal (green, grassy).

  3. Milk + teatop 11% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together738 recipes

    Shared aroma: 4-heptenal (creamy, biscuit).

  4. Corn + teatop 11% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together89 recipes

    Shared aroma: (e)-2-octenal (fatty, green).

  5. Corn + flourtop 13% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together6,165 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

Ranks compare each pair with 20,000 random ingredient pairs on CompKitchen. How we score pairs

What each ingredient does

Milk
Forms the liquid base that the starch thickens into a smooth, creamy set.
Corn-flour
Thickens the milk as its starch swells and gels when heated, giving the blancmange its firm texture.
Loaf sugar
Sweetens the dessert and adds a little body to the set.

The step that matters

Stirring the corn-flour mixture into the boiling milk. Starch clumps and can scorch on the base of the pan if not stirred. Continuous stirring disperses the starch evenly so it thickens smoothly as the starch granules swell and gelatinise.

Swap the lemon

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

  1. Vanillafits better
  2. Raisinfits better
  3. Figfits better
  4. Lemonthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against milk, corn, flour, tea, sugar. 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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