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Dessert

Koiled Corn Starch Pudding

A simple pudding made by thickening milk with corn starch, egg yolk, butter, and optional flavoring.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 7 ingredients
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Why it works: Milk and butter are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 7% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 81,283 recipes. Both carry (z)-4-heptenal, which smells biscuit, cream. The science ↓

Koiled Corn Starch Pudding

Ingredients

Directions

Make the pudding

  1. Boil the milk with the sugar.

  2. Mix the corn starch with a spoonful of cold milk and some hot milk.

  3. Stir the corn starch mixture into the boiling milk and cook for about 2 minutes, stirring constantly.

  4. Beat in the egg yolk and butter, then remove from heat.

  5. For flavoring, add a piece of orange zest or stick cinnamon.

Serve

  1. Serve with sweetened milk or cream.

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 + buttertop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together81,283 recipes

    Shared aroma: (z)-4-heptenal (biscuit, cream).

  2. Milk + corntop 10% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together6,955 recipes

    Shared aroma: hexanal (green, grassy).

  3. Corn + orangetop 11% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together586 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2,4-decadienal (seaweed).

  4. Corn + buttertop 14% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together7,345 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2,3-pentanedione (butter, sweet).

  5. Milk + orangetop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together4,696 recipes

    Shared aroma: 1-octen-3-one (mushroom, metallic).

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 smooth, set pudding as it cooks and swells with heat.
Egg yolk
Adds richness and helps give the pudding a creamy, smooth texture.
Milk
Forms the liquid base that the starch thickens into the pudding.
Butter
Adds fat for a silkier mouthfeel and richer flavor.

The step that matters

Stirring the starch into the boiling milk. Corn starch can clump if added unevenly, so it must be pre-mixed with cold milk and stirred constantly while cooking. Starch thickens as its granules swell with heat, and constant stirring keeps the pudding smooth rather than lumpy or scorched on the bottom.

Swap the orange

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

  1. Vanillafits better
  2. Coconutfits better
  3. Figfits better
  4. Orangethe original

Fit is the average pairing score against milk, sugar, corn, butter, 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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