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Dessert

Boiled Custard

A custard made by boiling milk and eggs, sweetened with sugar and flavored to taste, served with grated coconut.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 7 ingredients
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Why it works: Milk and coconut are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 10% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 2,648 recipes. Both carry delta-dodecalactone, which smells sweet, creamy. The science ↓

Boiled Custard

Ingredients

Directions

Make the custard

  1. In a kettle, heat 1 quart of milk in boiling water until it scalds.

  2. In a bowl, beat 5 eggs with 5 tablespoons of sugar.

  3. Add a little scalded milk to the egg mixture and stir to temper the eggs.

  4. Pour the egg mixture back into the scalded milk, stirring constantly until it thickens.

Finish and serve

  1. Flavor to taste and serve with grated coconut if desired.

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 + coconuttop 10% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together2,648 recipes

    Shared aroma: delta-dodecalactone (sweet, creamy).

  2. Egg + milktop 18% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together88,785 recipes

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

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

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

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

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

  5. Sugar + coconuttop 22% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together5,742 recipes

    Shared aroma: 1-penten-3-one (fish, pungent).

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
Thicken the custard as they set with heat, giving it body.
Milk
Forms the liquid base that the eggs thicken into a custard.
Sugar
Sweetens the custard and balances the richness of the eggs and milk.

The step that matters

Tempering the eggs. Adding hot milk to the eggs slowly raises their temperature, so they do not scramble. Stirring constantly keeps the custard smooth as it thickens.

Swap the coconut

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

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

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