Skip to main content
Dessert

Cornstarch Blanc-mange

A chilled custard-like dessert made from milk, sugar, corn starch, salt, and flavoring.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 5 ingredients
Jump to recipe ↓

Why it works: Milk and corn 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 ↓

Cornstarch Blanc-mange

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the starch

  1. Bring the milk to a boil in a saucepan.

  2. Blend the corn starch with a little cold milk.

Make the blancmange

  1. When the milk boils, stir in the corn starch.

  2. Stir continuously until it thickens, about 5 minutes.

  3. Taste to ensure the corn starch is smooth; boil longer if needed.

  4. Remove from heat and stir in the sugar, salt, and flavoring.

Set and serve

  1. Rinse a mold with cold water.

  2. Pour in the corn starch mixture and refrigerate to cool and harden.

  3. Serve very cold with vanilla-flavored custard 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. Milk + corntop 10% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together6,955 recipes

    Shared aroma: hexanal (green, grassy).

  2. Milk + sugartop 18% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together77,875 recipes

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

  3. Sugar + corntop 21% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together7,168 recipes

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

Milk and sugar 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

Corn starch
Thickens the milk into a firm, sliceable gel as it cooks and cools.
Milk
Forms the liquid base that the starch thickens into a creamy set dessert.
Sugar
Adds sweetness and balances the mild flavor of the milk and starch.

The step that matters

Stirring the starch into the boiling milk. Starch clumps if it hits hot liquid unblended, so it must be fully smooth first. Stirring continuously keeps it dispersed while the starch granules swell and thicken the mixture evenly.

“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.

You might also like

Corn CakeCorn Cake90 recipesCorn Starch CakeCorn Starch Cake89 recipesCorn CakesCorn Cakes22 recipesGreen Corn PuddingGreen Corn Pudding14 recipes