Skip to main content
Dessert

Boiled Custard

A custard made by heating milk, thickening with corn starch, and folding in beaten eggs, topped with cooked egg whites.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 5 ingredients
Jump to recipe ↓

Why it works: Milk and corn are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 10% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 6,955 recipes. Both carry hexanal, which smells green, grassy. The science ↓

Boiled Custard

Ingredients

Directions

Make the custard

  1. Heat the milk in a saucepan.

  2. Dissolve the corn starch in a little cold milk.

  3. Add the dissolved corn starch to the heated milk.

  4. Beat the egg yolks and sugar together, then mix them into the milk mixture.

  5. Cook until the mixture thickens to your desired consistency.

Make the egg white topping

  1. Beat the egg whites until frothy.

  2. Cook the frothy egg whites floating on boiling water for a few minutes.

  3. Remove the cooked egg whites with a skimmer and place them on an inverted sieve.

Serve

  1. Once the custard is cool, place the cooked egg whites on top.

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 + corntop 10% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together6,955 recipes

    Shared aroma: hexanal (green, grassy).

  2. Milk + eggtop 18% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together88,785 recipes

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

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

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

  4. Egg + sugartop 21% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together122,807 recipes

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

  5. Sugar + corntop 21% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together7,168 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 liquid base of the custard that thickens when cooked.
Eggs
Egg yolks thicken the custard as they cook, while whites form the cooked topping.
Corn starch
Thickens the custard by swelling in liquid when heated.
Sugar
Sweetens the custard and adds body to the beaten yolks.

The step that matters

Cooking the custard until it thickens. Egg yolks can curdle or scramble if the custard gets too hot too fast. Heating gently while stirring keeps it smooth, and the cornstarch helps stabilize it as it thickens.

“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.

More boiled custard recipes

Pudding 12Rich 6 See all 257 →

You might also like

Corn CakeCorn Cake90 recipesCorn Starch CakeCorn Starch Cake89 recipesCorn CakesCorn Cakes22 recipesGreen Corn PuddingGreen Corn Pudding14 recipes