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Pan for Boiling Milk

A method to reduce milk and add egg yolks to produce condensed milk.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 2 ingredients
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Why it works: Milk and egg 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 ↓

Pan for Boiling Milk

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare

  1. Fit a pan holding the milk to a boiler with a pipe leading to a cold water reservoir to regulate steam.

  2. Strain the milk and stir it constantly and briskly.

Reduce the milk

  1. When the water boils, reduce the heat and close the furnace door to maintain a moderate boil.

  2. After two hours, the milk should reduce to about 12 pints.

  3. About 15 minutes before finishing, dilute the egg yolks with 1 pint of milk and gradually stir it into the mixture.

Finish and bottle

  1. Once done, strain the milk to remove the egg yolks and cool it in tureens while stirring to prevent a film from forming.

  2. Bottle the milk, cork it, and boil for 15 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. Milk + eggtop 18% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together88,785 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

Milk
Forms the body of the condensed product; reducing it by boiling concentrates the milk solids and sugars.
Egg yolks
Add richness and thickening as they set gently into the reduced milk.

The step that matters

Adding the egg yolks. Yolks can scramble if they meet very hot milk directly. Diluting them with some milk first and stirring gradually tempers them, so they blend in smoothly instead of curdling.

“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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