Why it works: Milk and flour are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 14% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 78,219 recipes. Both carry isobutyraldehyde, which smells malty, green. The science ↓
Mock Custard Pie
Ingredients
Directions
Make the custard
Bring the milk to a boil in a saucepan.
Dissolve the flour in a little cold milk and stir it into the boiling milk.
Add the salt and mix well.
Bake
Pour the mixture into a pie crust and bake until set.
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.
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Milk + flourtop 14% of all pairsSmell alikelowCooked together78,219 recipes
Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).
Milk and flour barely smell alike, yet cooks put them together in 78,219 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
- Milk
- Provides the liquid base and most of the body of the custard.
- Flour
- Thickens the milk as its starch swells with heat, giving the custard structure.
The step that matters
Stirring the flour into the boiling milk. Flour dissolved in cold milk first keeps it from clumping. Starch thickens the custard as it heats, so the mixture should be stirred well while it boils to set smoothly.
“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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