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Potato Starch Pudding

A pudding made by boiling milk, adding potato starch paste, eggs, and salt, then cooking until thick.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 4 ingredients
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Why it works: Potato and milk are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 9% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 3,611 recipes. Both carry (e,z)-2,6-nonadienal, which smells cucumber, melon. The science ↓

Potato Starch Pudding

Ingredients

Directions

Make the pudding

  1. Boil the milk, reserving a little to moisten the starch.

  2. Stir the starch with the reserved milk to make a smooth paste.

  3. Add the starch paste to the boiling milk.

  4. Beat the eggs and add them to the mixture, stirring well.

  5. Let it boil until very thick, about 3 minutes.

Serve

  1. Pour into a dish and serve with wine sauce.

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. Potato + milktop 9% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together3,611 recipes

    Shared aroma: (e,z)-2,6-nonadienal (cucumber, melon).

  2. Milk + eggtop 18% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together88,785 recipes

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

  3. Potato + eggtop 29% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together4,978 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

Potato starch
Thickens the milk as it cooks, setting the pudding into a firm, smooth body.
Eggs
Add richness and help the pudding set as it thickens.
Milk
Forms the liquid base that the starch thickens into the pudding.

The step that matters

Make a smooth starch paste before adding it to the milk. Starch added dry or in lumps to hot liquid clumps and will not disperse evenly. Mixing it first with a little cold or reserved liquid lets the granules separate, so the pudding thickens smoothly.

Swap the potato

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

  1. Asparagusfits about as well
  2. Potatothe original
  3. Capsicumfits less well
  4. Sweet potatofits less well

Fit is the average pairing score against milk, egg. 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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