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Dessert

Cornfllour Blancmange

A sweet custard made from cornflour, milk, sugar, and a 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: 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

Make the blancmange

  1. Mix the cornflour smoothly with a little milk.

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

  3. Add the blended cornflour to the infused milk and cook gently for 5 minutes.

  4. Remove the bay leaf, add the sugar, and pour into a mould rinsed with 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. 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 as its starch swells when heated, setting the blancmange.
Milk
Forms the liquid base that the cornflour thickens into a smooth, creamy set.
Castor sugar
Adds sweetness and softens the flavour of the set blancmange.

The step that matters

Cooking the cornflour in the milk. Cornflour must be heated gently while stirred so its starch granules swell and thicken evenly. Cooking it too fast or without stirring can cause lumps or scorching on the base of the pan.

“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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