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Dessert

Pastry Cream

A custard made from milk, sugar, flour, butter, eggs, and lemon extract, cooked until thick.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 6 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 ↓

Pastry Cream

Ingredients

Directions

Make the custard

  1. Boil the milk with a little sugar to prevent burning.

  2. Mix the remaining sugar and flour together.

  3. Dredge the mixture into the boiling milk while beating continuously.

  4. Cook for five minutes.

  5. Add the butter.

  6. Lightly beat the eggs and stir them into the mixture.

  7. Cover and cook at the back of the range for about ten more minutes.

Finish

  1. Flavor when nearly cold.

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. Flour + buttertop 12% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together124,287 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  3. Milk + flourtop 14% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together78,219 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  4. Sugar + flourtop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together92,116 recipes

    Shared aroma: phenylacetaldehyde (hawthorne, honey).

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

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

Flour and butter barely smell alike, yet cooks put them together in 124,287 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

Milk
Forms the liquid base that thickens into the custard.
Flour
Thickens the milk as its starch swells with heat.
Eggs
Add richness and help set the custard as they cook.
Sugar
Sweetens the cream and helps keep the milk from scorching.
Butter
Adds fat for a smoother, richer texture.

The step that matters

Dredge the mixture into the boiling milk while beating continuously. Adding flour to hot liquid without constant beating causes lumps, because starch clumps before it can disperse. Steady whisking keeps the starch even so the cream thickens smoothly.

Swap the lemon

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

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

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