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Custard Ice Cream

Custard ice cream made by cooling custard, adding cream, and freezing.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 3 ingredients
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Why it works: Sugar and cream are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 9% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 43,450 recipes. Both carry 2,3-butanedione, which smells butter, sweet. The science ↓

Custard Ice Cream

Oven, in the book's wordsA very moderate oven

Ingredients

Directions

Make the custard

  1. Make a custard with the milk and sugar.

  2. Allow the custard to cool.

Finish and freeze

  1. Add cream to the cooled custard.

  2. Freeze the mixture according to your ice cream maker's instructions.

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. Sugar + creamtop 9% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together43,450 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2,3-butanedione (butter, sweet).

  2. Milk + creamtop 18% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together29,399 recipes

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

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

Milk
Provides the liquid base and milk solids that give the custard its body.
Sugar
Adds sweetness and lowers the freezing point, keeping the ice cream softer.
Cream
Adds fat, which makes the ice cream richer and smoother in texture.

The step that matters

Cool the custard completely before adding cream and freezing. A warm base freezes slowly and forms large ice crystals, giving a coarse, icy texture. Chilling the custard first lets the ice cream freeze quickly and smoothly in the machine.

“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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