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Dessert

Cold Cup Custard

A chilled custard made with milk, cream, sugar, and wine, served in cups with grated nutmeg.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 4 ingredients
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Why it works: Cream and sugar 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 ↓

Cold Cup Custard

Ingredients

Directions

Make the custard

  1. Mix the milk, cream, and sugar together.

  2. Stir the wine into the mixture.

  3. Pour the mixture into custard cups.

  4. Set the cups aside until the milk curdles.

Finish and serve

  1. Grate nutmeg on top.

  2. Serve with cream that has been kept on ice.

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. Cream + sugartop 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).

  4. Milk + winetop 19% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together3,116 recipes

    Shared aroma: sotolon (fenugreek, curry).

  5. Cream + winetop 19% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together3,887 recipes

    Shared aroma: 1-octen-3-one (mushroom, metallic).

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
Forms the body of the custard, curdling into a soft set when rennet acts on it.
Cream
Adds richness and a smooth, creamy texture to the custard.
Fine white sugar
Adds sweetness and balances the tang of the curdled milk.
Wine with rennet
Carries the rennet that causes the milk to coagulate into a set custard.

The step that matters

Set the cups aside until the milk curdles. Rennet needs time and still conditions to coagulate the milk into a firm curd. Moving or disturbing the cups too early can break the forming set and leave the custard grainy or loose.

“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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