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Dessert

Cup Custards

A baked custard made with milk, eggs, sugar, lemon peel, and optional nutmeg and wine, served in individual cups.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 6 ingredients
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Cup Custards

Why it works: Lemon and nutmeg match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 5% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 11,318 recipes. Both carry beta-phellandrene, which smells minty, terpene. The science ↓

Cup Custards

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 lemon peel in the milk.

  2. Strain the milk and let it cool.

  3. Beat the eggs well and add them to the cooled milk.

  4. Stir in sugar to taste, and add nutmeg and wine if desired.

  5. Mix well and pour the mixture into cups.

Bake and serve

  1. Bake in a 350°F (175°C) oven until thick, then remove immediately to avoid whey.

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.

Photo for illustrative purposes only · Contact us to use it

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. Lemon + nutmegtop 5% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together11,318 recipes

    Shared aroma: beta-phellandrene (minty, terpene).

  2. Lemon + winetop 13% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together6,157 recipes

    Shared aroma: decanal (soap, orange peel).

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

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

  4. Milk + nutmegtop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together14,685 recipes

    Shared aroma: eucalyptol (eucalyptus, herbal).

  5. Egg + nutmegtop 17% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together24,744 recipes

    Shared aroma: acetic acid (sour, vinegar).

Egg and nutmeg barely smell alike, yet cooks put them together in 24,744 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

Eggs
Coagulate on heating to set the custard into a thick, sliceable texture.
Milk
Forms the liquid body of the custard, carrying the eggs and flavour.
Sugar
Adds sweetness and balances the flavour of the milk and eggs.

The step that matters

Remove the custards from the oven immediately once thick. Egg proteins keep setting from residual heat, and overbaking causes the custard to curdle and weep whey.

Swap the nutmeg

The recipe marks nutmeg as optional. How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (milk, lemon, egg, sugar, wine):

  1. Cinnamonfits better
  2. Nutmegthe original
  3. Tarragonfits about as well
  4. Thymefits less well

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