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Dessert

Boiled Custard, or Mock Cream

A custard made by boiling milk with corn starch, eggs, sugar, and flavoring, served cold.

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 ↓

Boiled Custard, or Mock Cream

Ingredients

Directions

Make the custard

  1. Heat the milk in a saucepan until nearly boiling.

  2. Dissolve the corn starch in a little cold milk and add it to the hot milk.

  3. Beat the eggs and mix them with the powdered sugar, then add to the saucepan.

  4. Stir briskly and let it boil once or twice until thickened.

Finish and serve

  1. Flavor to taste and serve very cold as a substitute for ice 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. Corn + milktop 10% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together6,955 recipes

    Shared aroma: hexanal (green, grassy).

  3. Corn + lemontop 13% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together1,927 recipes

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

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

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

  5. Milk + lemontop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together19,053 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

Corn starch
Thickens the custard as it heats, giving it body without making it heavy.
Milk
Forms the liquid base that the starch thickens and the eggs enrich.
Eggs
Add richness and help set the custard as they cook.
Powdered sugar
Sweetens the custard and dissolves smoothly into the warm base.

The step that matters

Stir briskly and let it boil once or twice until thickened. Starch thickens only when it reaches a boil, but the eggs can scramble if overheated. Constant stirring spreads heat evenly and keeps the custard smooth while it thickens.

Swap the lemon

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

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

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