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Dessert

Custard Souffle

A baked custard dish made with eggs, butter, flour, milk, and powdered sugar.

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

Oven, in the book's wordsA quick oven

Ingredients

Directions

Make the base

  1. Cream the butter in a bowl.

  2. Add the flour and mix well.

  3. Pour in boiling milk and cook for 10 minutes, stirring constantly.

  4. In a separate bowl, beat the egg yolks and sugar together, then add to the mixture.

Fold, bake and serve

  1. Once cool, fold in the beaten egg whites.

  2. Pour into a buttered dish and bake for 20 minutes.

  3. Serve with a creamy 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. Flour + sugartop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together92,116 recipes

    Shared aroma: phenylacetaldehyde (hawthorne, honey).

  5. Egg + flourtop 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
Yolks enrich and set the custard, while beaten whites trap air so the soufflé rises.
Butter
Adds fat for richness, flavor and a tender texture.
Flour
Thickens the hot milk into a stable, spoonable base.
Milk
Forms the liquid body of the custard base once cooked with the flour.
Powdered sugar
Sweetens the custard and balances the richness of the eggs.

The step that matters

Fold in the beaten egg whites gently once the base has cooled. Beaten whites hold air bubbles that make the soufflé rise. Folding into a hot base can deflate them, and overmixing knocks out air, leaving a dense result.

“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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