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Dessert

Cornfllour Blancmange

A custard-like dessert made from cornflour and milk, flavored with a bay leaf and optionally sweetened with sugar.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 4 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 ↓

Cornfllour Blancmange

Ingredients

Directions

Make the blancmange

  1. Mix the cornflour smoothly with a little milk.

  2. Boil the remaining milk with the bay leaf.

  3. Remove the bay leaf when the milk boils.

  4. Stir in the blended cornflour and cook gently for about 10 minutes.

Set and serve

  1. Pour into a mold rinsed with cold water.

  2. If using sugar, add it to the milk before boiling.

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 as its starch swells and gels when heated.
Milk
Forms the liquid base that sets into the body of the blancmange.
Castor sugar
Adds sweetness to the milk base.

The step that matters

Stirring in the blended cornflour and cooking gently. Cornflour starch only thickens once it heats through, so the mixture must be stirred constantly. Stirring keeps the starch dispersed, prevents lumps, and stops it scorching on the base of the pan.

“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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