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Dessert

Custard Souffle

A light custard-based dessert folded with beaten egg whites and baked.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 5 ingredients
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Why it works: Butter and milk 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 ↓

Custard Souffle

Ingredients

Directions

The book gives no oven temperature. The 350°F (175°C) in the steps was added when the recipe was transcribed, as a starting point.

Make the custard base

  1. Boil the milk in a saucepan.

  2. In another pan, heat the butter and flour together.

  3. Gradually add the boiling milk to the butter and flour mixture.

  4. Cook for 8 minutes, stirring often.

  5. Beat the sugar and egg yolks together, then add to the cooked mixture and let it cool.

Bake and serve

  1. Once cool, beat the egg whites until stiff and fold them into the custard.

  2. Pour the mixture into a buttered pudding dish and bake at 350°F (175°C).

  3. Serve immediately with cream 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. Butter + milktop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together81,283 recipes

    Shared aroma: (z)-4-heptenal (biscuit, cream).

  2. Butter + flourtop 12% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together124,287 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  3. Flour + milktop 14% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together78,219 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  4. Sugar + flourtop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together92,116 recipes

    Shared aroma: phenylacetaldehyde (hawthorne, honey).

  5. Flour + eggtop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together106,462 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

Butter and flour barely smell alike, yet cooks put them together in 124,287 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
Whipped whites and yolks provide the lift and structure that set the souffle as it bakes.
Flour
Cooked with butter, it thickens the milk into a stable custard base.
Butter
Cooked with flour to form a roux, adding richness and body to the base.
Milk
Forms the liquid base that the flour thickens into custard.
Sugar
Adds sweetness and helps stabilise the beaten egg yolks.

The step that matters

Fold the beaten egg whites into the cooled custard. Folding gently keeps the air in the stiff whites. Deflating the foam makes the souffle rise less and turn dense when it bakes.

“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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