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Custard Buns

Custard buns are sweet buns filled with boiled custard and sprinkled with pink sugar.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 7 ingredients
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Why it works: Lemon and red currant work together. They rank in the top 12% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 309 recipes. Both carry alpha-pinene, which smells pine, turpentine. The science ↓

Custard Buns

Ingredients

Directions

The book gives no oven temperature. The 400°F (200°C) in the steps was added when the recipe was transcribed, as a starting point.

Shape and bake

  1. Roll the bun dough into lengths the size of your forefinger and coil them into a figure-eight shape.

  2. Place them on baking pans and wash with a mixture of water and egg.

  3. Bake at 400°F (200°C) until they are a rich brown.

Fill and finish

  1. Once baked, fill each part of the figure-eight with boiled custard and sprinkle with pink sugar.

  2. For an improvement, add a little red currant or fruit jelly before the custard.

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. Lemon + red curranttop 12% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together309 recipes

    Shared aroma: alpha-pinene (pine, turpentine).

  2. Butter + lemontop 16% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together41,227 recipes

    Shared aroma: 3-hexenal (apple, fruity).

  3. Butter + eggtop 17% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together118,967 recipes

    Shared aroma: decanal (soap, orange peel).

  4. Sugar + buttertop 17% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together98,233 recipes

    Shared aroma: guaiacol (smoky, sweet).

  5. Sugar + lemontop 18% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together53,532 recipes

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

Sugar and lemon barely smell alike, yet cooks put them together in 53,532 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

Bun dough
Forms the soft, bread-like structure of the buns.
Eggs
Wash gives the buns a glossy, browned surface; eggs also enrich the custard.
Butter
Adds fat for richness and a tender crumb.
Powdered sugar
Sweetens the custard and adds smoothness.

The step that matters

Bake until a rich brown. Baking long enough develops the browned crust through the Maillard reaction and sets the dough so it holds the custard filling without going soggy.

Swap the red currant

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

  1. Vanillafits better
  2. Orangefits better
  3. Raspberryfits better
  4. Red currantthe original

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