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Baked or Steamed Caramel Custard

A custard made with caramelized sugar, milk, and water, baked or steamed in a buttered mold.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 4 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 ↓

Baked or Steamed Caramel Custard

Ingredients

Directions

Make the custard

  1. Melt sugar with 2 tablespoons of water to form a caramel.

  2. Add the caramel to hot milk and mix well.

  3. Pour the mixture into a buttered mold.

Steam and serve

  1. Steam the mold until set.

  2. Serve warm or cold with caramel sauce.

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. Sugar + buttertop 17% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together98,233 recipes

    Shared aroma: guaiacol (smoky, sweet).

  3. Sugar + milktop 18% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together77,875 recipes

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

Sugar and milk 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

Sugar
Caramelizes into the sauce base, giving sweetness, deep flavor and golden color.
Hot milk
Supplies most of the liquid and gives the set custard its soft, creamy body.

The step that matters

Melting the sugar into caramel. Sugar can go from amber to burnt within seconds. Burnt caramel tastes bitter and can't be rescued, so watch closely and stop cooking once it reaches a rich amber.

“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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