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Dessert

Renter Custard, or Curds and Whey

A milk custard set with rennet, optionally flavored with wine or rose water, served with sugar and cream.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 6 ingredients
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Why it works: Sugar and cream 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 ↓

Renter Custard, or Curds and Whey

Ingredients

Directions

Make the custard

  1. Warm the milk in the serving dish until slightly warm.

  2. Mix the liquid rennet with wine, or, if omitting wine, use an extra ½ teaspoon of rennet with 3 tablespoons of rose water.

  3. Stir the rennet mixture into the milk gently for half a minute.

  4. Let it stand for at least 30 minutes until set.

Serve

  1. Serve with sugar and 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. Sugar + creamtop 9% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together43,450 recipes

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

  2. Milk + creamtop 18% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together29,399 recipes

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

  3. Wine + rosetop 18% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together438 recipes

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

  4. Milk + sugartop 18% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together77,875 recipes

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

  5. Milk + winetop 19% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together3,116 recipes

    Shared aroma: sotolon (fenugreek, curry).

Milk and sugar 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

Milk
Forms the body of the custard, which sets into a soft curd when the rennet acts on it.
Liquid rennet
Enzyme that coagulates the milk proteins, turning the liquid into a set custard.
Wine
Adds liquid and flavour to the rennet mixture, carrying the rennet evenly through the milk.

The step that matters

Stir the rennet mixture gently into the milk. Rennet works by clotting the milk proteins. Stirring too hard or too long can break up the forming curd, so the custard may set grainy or loose. A brief, gentle stir distributes the enzyme evenly before the milk is left undisturbed to set.

“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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