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Dessert

Corn Flour Milk

A sweet milk pudding made with corn flour, eggs, and lemon rind.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 6 ingredients
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Why it works: Corn and milk are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 10% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 6,955 recipes. Both carry hexanal, which smells green, grassy. The science ↓

Corn Flour Milk

Ingredients

Directions

Flavor the milk

  1. Cut the rind of ½ lemon very thinly and add it to 1 pint of milk.

  2. Let it sit by the fire in an enamel saucepan until flavored.

  3. Remove the lemon rind and bring the milk to a boil.

Make the pudding

  1. In a bowl, mix 2 tablespoons of corn flour with ½ cup of milk until smooth, then add 2 well-beaten eggs.

  2. Strain the boiling milk into the corn flour mixture and pour everything back into the saucepan.

  3. Boil again, stirring well over the heat for 5 minutes.

  4. Sweeten to taste with sugar or honey.

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. Corn + milktop 10% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together6,955 recipes

    Shared aroma: hexanal (green, grassy).

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

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  3. Corn + lemontop 13% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together1,927 recipes

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

  4. Flour + milktop 14% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together78,219 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  5. Flour + sugartop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together92,116 recipes

    Shared aroma: phenylacetaldehyde (hawthorne, honey).

Flour and milk barely smell alike, yet cooks put them together in 78,219 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

Corn flour
Thickens the milk as it heats, giving the pudding its body.
Eggs
Add richness and help set the pudding as it cooks.
Milk
Forms the base of the pudding and carries the lemon flavor.

The step that matters

Boil again, stirring well over the heat for 5 minutes. Corn flour thickens only when the mixture boils, and stirring keeps it smooth and prevents lumps or scorching on the base of the pan. Eggs added to the hot mixture can curdle if it is not stirred constantly, so keep the heat controlled.

Swap the lemon

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

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

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