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Dessert

Corn-flour Milk

A thickened milk made with corn flour, eggs, and sweetened with honey, sugar, or treacle.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 6 ingredients
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Why it works: Lemon and tea 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 Milk

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare

  1. Add lemon rind or laurel leaf to milk and let it sit by the fire to infuse flavor.

  2. Bring the milk to a boil.

Make the custard

  1. Mix corn flour with ½ tea-cup of milk to form a smooth paste.

  2. Beat in the eggs and stir the boiling milk into the corn flour mixture.

  3. Return the mixture to the saucepan and boil again.

  4. Stir over heat for 5 minutes, then sweeten with honey, sugar, or treacle before serving.

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. Lemon + teatop 8% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together610 recipes

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

  2. Milk + honeytop 10% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together1,336 recipes

    Shared aroma: ethyl octanoate (fruity).

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

    Shared aroma: hexanal (green, grassy).

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

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

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

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

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

What each ingredient does

Corn flour
Thickens the milk as it cooks, giving the mixture a smooth, pudding-like body.
Eggs
Add richness and help set and thicken the custard as it heats.
Milk
Forms the main liquid base that thickens into the pudding.

The step that matters

Stirring the boiling milk into the corn flour paste. Adding hot milk to the paste too quickly or without constant stirring can cause lumps. Stirring while pouring keeps the starch dispersed so it thickens evenly.

Swap the lemon

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

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

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