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Dessert

Custard Almond

Custard Almond is a sweet custard made with cream, egg yolks, sugar, corn starch, and almonds.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 5 ingredients
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Why it works: Corn and almond match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 8% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 485 recipes. Both carry 2,4-decadienal, which smells seaweed. The science ↓

Custard Almond

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare

  1. In a bowl, beat the egg yolks and sugar together.

  2. Dissolve the corn-starch in a little water and add it to the egg mixture.

  3. In a saucepan, bring the sweet cream to a boil.

Make the custard

  1. Stir the egg mixture into the boiling cream and cook until thickened.

  2. Blanch the almonds, chop half of them finely, and stir into the cream.

Finish

  1. Split the remaining almonds and lay them on top as decoration.

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. Corn + almondtop 8% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together485 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2,4-decadienal (seaweed).

  2. Cream + sugartop 9% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together43,450 recipes

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

  3. Cream + almondtop 16% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together5,130 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-heptanol (bitter, floral).

  4. Sugar + almondtop 18% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together15,679 recipes

    Shared aroma: 1-penten-3-one (fish, pungent).

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

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

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

What each ingredient does

Egg yolks
Thicken the custard as they set with heat, and add richness.
Sweet cream
Provides the liquid base and fat that give the custard a smooth, rich texture.
Sugar
Sweetens the custard and softens the flavour of the egg yolks.
Corn-starch
Thickens the cream mixture so the custard holds its body when cooked.
Almonds
Add nutty aroma and a bit of texture through the custard.

The step that matters

Stir the egg mixture into the boiling cream and cook until thickened. Adding the eggs to very hot cream without stirring can scramble them. Stirring constantly while adding them, then cooking gently, lets the proteins set evenly into a smooth custard.

“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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