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Dessert

Baked Custard

A custard of cream or milk, egg yolks and sugar, flavoured with peach kernels and baked in cups set in water.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 7 ingredients
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Why it works: Cream and sugar are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 9% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 43,450 recipes. Both carry 2,3-butanedione, which smells butter, sweet. The science ↓

Baked Custard

Ingredients

Directions

The book gives no oven temperature. The 350°F (175°C) in the steps was added when the recipe was transcribed, as a starting point.

Make the custard base

  1. Boil the cream or milk with cinnamon and peach kernels tied in muslin.

  2. Let it cool.

  3. Beat the yolks of 14 eggs and the whites of 4 eggs.

  4. Sweeten and strain into a pitcher.

Bake

  1. Pour the mixture into cups and place them in a baking dish.

  2. Surround the cups with boiling water, reaching nearly to the top of the cups.

  3. Bake at 350°F (175°C) until a scum rises on top, about 10 minutes.

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. Cream + sugartop 9% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together43,450 recipes

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

  2. Peach + milktop 10% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together781 recipes

    Shared aroma: phellandrene (minty).

  3. Peach + sugartop 17% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together2,308 recipes

    Shared aroma: beta-damascenone (apple, rose).

  4. Cream + milktop 18% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together29,399 recipes

    Shared aroma: delta-dodecalactone (sweet, creamy).

  5. Egg + milktop 18% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together88,785 recipes

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

Ranks compare each pair with 20,000 random ingredient pairs on CompKitchen. How we score pairs

What each ingredient does

Egg yolks
Thicken the custard as they set, adding richness and a smooth texture.
Egg whites
Add structure to the custard as they set during baking.
Cream or milk
Provides the liquid base and moisture that keeps the custard soft and creamy.
Sugar
Sweetens the custard and balances the flavor of the eggs.
Peach kernels
Flavor the custard with an aroma carried into the milk.

The step that matters

Surround the cups with boiling water. The water bath moderates the heat reaching the egg mixture. Gentle, even heat lets the eggs set into a smooth custard, while direct high heat can make them curdle or turn grainy.

Swap the peach

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

  1. Vanillafits better
  2. Strawberryfits better
  3. Raspberryfits about as well
  4. Peachthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against cream, egg, sugar, milk. 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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