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Dessert

Simple Desserts-custards

A baked custard made with eggs, milk, sugar, and salt.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 4 ingredients
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Why it works: Egg and milk are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 18% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 88,785 recipes. Both carry 2-nonenal, which smells fatty, green. The science ↓

Simple Desserts-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.

Prepare

  1. Preheat your oven to 350°F (175°C).

Make the custard

  1. In a bowl, thoroughly mix the eggs without beating them light.

  2. Add the sugar and salt to the egg mixture.

  3. Scald the milk and slowly stir it into the egg mixture.

  4. Strain the mixture through a fine sieve to remove any bits of membrane.

Bake

  1. Pour the strained mixture into a baking dish.

  2. Bake in the preheated oven until set, about 30-40 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. Egg + milktop 18% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together88,785 recipes

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

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

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

  3. Egg + sugartop 21% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together122,807 recipes

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

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

Eggs
Set the custard into a firm, tender structure as they cook.
Milk
Provides the liquid base and moisture that gives the custard its smooth body.
Sugar
Adds sweetness and softens the set custard's flavour.

The step that matters

Baking until just set. Eggs thicken as their proteins coagulate with heat. Baking past that point squeezes out water and turns the custard grainy or watery, so it should wobble slightly in the centre when removed.

“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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