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Dessert

With French Custard Sauce

A custard made from plantain pulp, sugar, butter, cream, eggs, sherry, and lemon, baked until set.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 7 ingredients
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Why it works: Butter and cream are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 8% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 41,516 recipes. Both carry delta-dodecalactone, which smells sweet, creamy. The science ↓

With French Custard Sauce

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

  1. In a large bowl, combine plantain pulp, sugar, and butter. Mix until smooth.

  2. Add cream, eggs, sherry, lemon juice, and grated rind. Stir well to combine.

Bake and serve

  1. Pour the mixture into a baking dish and bake at 350°F (175°C) until set.

  2. Serve warm or chilled with additional custard sauce if desired.

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 + creamtop 8% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together41,516 recipes

    Shared aroma: delta-dodecalactone (sweet, creamy).

  2. Sugar + creamtop 9% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together43,450 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2,3-butanedione (butter, sweet).

  3. Butter + sherrytop 14% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together3,505 recipes

    Shared aroma: ethyl octanoate (fruity, wine).

  4. Butter + lemontop 16% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together41,227 recipes

    Shared aroma: 3-hexenal (apple, fruity).

  5. Butter + eggtop 17% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together118,967 recipes

    Shared aroma: decanal (soap, orange peel).

Ranks compare each pair with 20,000 random ingredient pairs on CompKitchen. How we score pairs

What each ingredient does

Plantain pulp
Forms the body of the custard and gives it its main flavour and soft texture.
Eggs
Set when heated, giving the custard its structure and firm yet tender texture.
Cream
Adds richness and moisture, producing a smoother, softer custard.
Butter
Adds fat for richness and a silkier mouthfeel in the baked custard.
Sugar
Sweetens the custard and contributes to its browning at the edges during baking.

The step that matters

Bake until set. Eggs thicken as they heat, so underbaking leaves the custard runny while overbaking can make it grainy or curdled. Checking for a set centre prevents both problems.

Swap the lemon

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (sugar, butter, cream, egg, sherry):

  1. Vanillafits better
  2. Strawberryfits better
  3. Raspberryfits better
  4. Lemonthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against sugar, butter, cream, egg, sherry. 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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