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Dessert

French Custard

A custard made by boiling milk, folding in beaten egg whites, then thickening with yolks and garnishing with jelly or marmalade.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 4 ingredients
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French Custard

Why it works: Milk and egg are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 18% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 88,785 recipes. Both carry 2-nonenal, which smells fatty, green. The science ↓

French Custard

Ingredients

Directions

Make the floating islands

  1. Bring 1 quart of flavored and sweetened milk to a boil in a flat saucepan.

  2. Beat the whites of 8 eggs until frothy.

  3. Drop spoonfuls of the beaten egg whites into the milk.

  4. Let the egg whites harden slightly.

  5. Skim the egg whites off the milk.

  6. Place the skimmed egg whites on a dish.

Make the custard and serve

  1. Beat the yolks of the eggs.

  2. Stir the beaten yolks into the milk until it thickens.

  3. Pour the thickened milk over the egg whites.

  4. Garnish with jelly or marmalade.

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.

Photo for illustrative purposes only · Contact us to use it

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 + eggtop 18% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together88,785 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

Milk
Forms the liquid base of the custard and, once thickened, the sauce around the egg whites.
Egg whites
Beaten into foam, they set lightly in the hot milk to form the soft floating islands.
Egg yolks
Thicken the warm milk into a custard as they set with gentle heat.

The step that matters

Stir the beaten yolks into the milk until it thickens. Yolks thicken as their proteins set with heat, but if the milk is too hot or stirred too little, the yolks can scramble into lumps. Keep the heat moderate and stir constantly.

“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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