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Dessert

Cornfllour Blancmange

A sweet custard made from cornflour, milk, and optional sugar, cooked with a bay leaf.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 4 ingredients
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Why it works: Sugar and milk are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 18% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 77,875 recipes. Both carry 2-nonenal, which smells fatty, green. The science ↓

Cornfllour Blancmange

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare

  1. Mix the cornflour smoothly with a little milk.

  2. Boil the rest of the milk with the bay leaf.

  3. Remove the bay leaf when the milk boils.

  4. If using sugar, add it to the milk before boiling.

Make and set

  1. Stir in the blended cornflour and cook gently for about 10 minutes.

  2. Pour into a mold rinsed with cold water.

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

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

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
Thickens the milk into a smooth, sliceable set as its starch swells on cooking.
Milk
Forms the liquid base that the cornflour thickens into the blancmange.
Castor sugar
Adds sweetness to the milk before boiling.

The step that matters

Stir in the blended cornflour and cook gently. Cornflour starch must be fully mixed in smoothly and heated until it swells and thickens. Adding it to boiling milk without blending first causes lumps, and cooking too hard can break down the thickened starch.

“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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