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Dessert

Cornflour Blanc-Mange

A chilled dessert made from cornflour, milk, and sugar.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 3 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 ↓

Cornflour Blanc-Mange

Ingredients

Directions

Make the blanc-mange

  1. Dissolve cornflour in a little cold milk.

  2. Heat the remaining milk and add sugar.

  3. Stir in the dissolved cornflour and cook until thickened.

Set and serve

  1. Pour into a mold and let it set.

  2. Serve chilled.

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 when heated.
Milk
Forms the liquid base that the cornflour thickens into a creamy custard.

The step that matters

Stir in the dissolved cornflour and cook until thickened. Cornflour must be fully dissolved in cold milk before it meets hot liquid, or it clumps. The mixture must then be cooked long enough for the starch granules to swell and gelatinise, which is what gives the set.

“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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