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Custards Boiled

Custards boiled are sweet milk custards flavored with cinnamon, lemon rind, and optional laurel or bitter almonds, thickened with egg yolks and whites.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 6 ingredients
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Why it works: Cinnamon and laurel match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 4% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 691 recipes. Both carry cinnamyl acetate, which smells sweet aromatic, cinnamon. The science ↓

Custards Boiled

Ingredients

Directions

Make the custard base

  1. Boil the milk with cinnamon, lemon rind, laurel leaves, and sugar.

  2. When the milk boils, remove it from the heat and strain it.

Combine and cook

  1. Beat the yolks of 8 eggs and the whites of 4 eggs; add a little milk and strain into another dish.

  2. Stir the egg mixture into the hot milk.

  3. Return to the saucepan and heat while stirring constantly until it reaches boiling point.

Cool

  1. Remove from heat and pour into a jug, stirring until nearly cold.

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. Cinnamon + laureltop 4% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together691 recipes

    Shared aroma: cinnamyl acetate (sweet aromatic, cinnamon).

  2. Cinnamon + lemontop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together7,950 recipes

    Shared aroma: beta-phellandrene (minty, terpene).

  3. Lemon + laureltop 10% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together2,239 recipes

    Shared aroma: beta-phellandrene (minty, terpene).

  4. Milk + cinnamontop 10% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together12,655 recipes

    Shared aroma: cuminaldehyde (Spicy, cumin).

  5. Cinnamon + sugartop 10% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together30,779 recipes

    Shared aroma: guaiacol (smoky, sweet).

Cinnamon and sugar barely smell alike, yet cooks put them together in 30,779 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 and whites thicken the custard as they heat, giving it body.
Milk
Forms the liquid base of the custard and carries the flavour.
Sugar
Adds sweetness to balance the rich dairy and egg.

The step that matters

Heating the egg mixture after combining. Egg proteins set as they heat, so the custard must be stirred constantly and only brought to boiling point. Overheating or leaving it still can cause curdling or lumps.

Swap the lemon

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (milk, cinnamon, laurel, sugar, egg):

  1. Vanillafits better
  2. Lemonthe original
  3. Figfits about as well
  4. Pumpkinfits about as well

Fit is the average pairing score against milk, cinnamon, laurel, sugar, egg. 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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