is the British, and cornstarch the American, name for a fine starch prepared from maize. It is not the same as cornmeal or maize meal, which are relatively whole flours containing most of the maize grain. Cornflour is made by softening maize in weak acid, grinding it, separating the bran, and washing all non-starchy substances out of the ground meal.
Because cornflour has a very fine texture and contains no gluten it has less tendency to form lumps than ordinary flour. Another advantage is that it has virtually no flavour, whereas the grainy flavour of wheat flour requires some cooking before it goes away. For these reasons cornflour is popular as a thickener in western cooking.
Cornflour is also used as a thickener in oriental dishes, but not nearly as much as western books about, for example, Chinese cooking suggest. The texture imparted by cornflour is unsuitable for many oriental dishes, and the fact that it makes liquids cloudy excludes its use for others. For a survey of the thickeners most used in Chinese cookery, see tapioca; arrowroot.
Alan Davidson was a distinguished author and publisher, and one of the world's best-known writers on fish and fish cookery. In 1975 he retired early from the diplomatic service—after serving in, among other places, Washington, Egypt, Tunisia, and Laos, where he was British Ambassador—to pursue a fruitful second career as a food historian and food writer extraordinaire. Among his popular books are Seafood of South-East Asia, North Atlantic Seafood, and Mediterranean Seafood. In 2003, shortly before his death, he was awarded the Erasmus Prize for his contribution to European culture.
