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Baked or Steamed Caramel Custard

A custard made by adding caramel to hot milk and steaming until set.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 4 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 ↓

Baked or Steamed Caramel Custard

Ingredients

Directions

Make the caramel milk

  1. Melt the sugar with 2 tablespoons of water to create a caramel.

  2. Add the caramel to the hot milk.

Steam and serve

  1. Pour the mixture into a buttered mold.

  2. Steam the mold until set.

  3. Serve warm or cold, optionally with caramel sauce.

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

    Shared aroma: guaiacol (smoky, sweet).

  3. Sugar + milktop 18% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together77,875 recipes

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

Sugar and milk 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

Sugar
Provides sweetness and, once melted, the caramel flavour and colour.
Hot milk
Supplies the liquid base and creamy body of the custard.

The step that matters

Melting the sugar into caramel. Sugar darkens quickly once it melts, so it can go from golden to bitter and burnt within seconds. Watch the colour closely and remove it from the heat as soon as it reaches a rich golden shade.

“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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