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Rennet Custard

A custard made by curdling milk with rennet, sweetened with sugar and flavored with cherry juice.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 4 ingredients
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Why it works: Milk and cherry work together. They rank in the top 13% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 851 recipes. Both carry (e,z)-2,6-nonadienal, which smells cucumber, melon. The science ↓

Rennet Custard

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare

  1. Heat the milk until lukewarm.

  2. Add the sugar and cherry juice, stirring until the sugar is dissolved.

  3. Add the rennet and mix well.

Set

  1. Pour the mixture into small molds and let it stand in a cool place until firm.

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 + cherrytop 13% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together851 recipes

    Shared aroma: (e,z)-2,6-nonadienal (cucumber, melon).

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

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

  3. Sugar + cherrytop 20% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together2,598 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
Forms the base of the custard and supplies the protein that sets into a soft gel.
Liquid rennet
Enzyme that curdles the milk proteins, causing the mixture to set into a firm custard.
Sugar
Adds sweetness and helps balance the tartness of the cherry juice.
Cherry juice
Adds fruity flavour and a little acidity, plus colour to the custard.

The step that matters

Adding the rennet and mixing well. Rennet works on milk proteins and must be evenly distributed, otherwise parts of the custard may fail to set. Milk that is too hot can also weaken the enzyme, so the lukewarm temperature matters.

Swap the cherry

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (milk, sugar):

  1. Vanillafits better
  2. Figfits better
  3. Peachfits better
  4. Cherrythe original

Fit is the average pairing score against milk, sugar. 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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