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Dessert

Custakd Souffle

A baked custard soufflé made with butter, flour, sugar, milk, and eggs.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 5 ingredients
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Why it works: Butter and milk are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 7% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 81,283 recipes. Both carry (z)-4-heptenal, which smells biscuit, cream. The science ↓

Custakd Souffle

Ingredients

Directions

Make the custard base

  1. Bring 1 cup of milk to a boil.

  2. In a separate bowl, combine flour and butter, then gradually add to the boiling milk.

  3. Beat the egg yolks with sugar, then mix into the cooked mixture and let it cool.

Assemble and bake

  1. Whip the egg whites until stiff, then fold into the cooled mixture.

  2. Pour into a buttered pudding dish and bake.

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 + milktop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together81,283 recipes

    Shared aroma: (z)-4-heptenal (biscuit, cream).

  2. Butter + flourtop 12% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together124,287 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  3. Flour + milktop 14% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together78,219 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  4. Flour + sugartop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together92,116 recipes

    Shared aroma: phenylacetaldehyde (hawthorne, honey).

  5. Flour + eggtop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together106,462 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

Butter and flour barely smell alike, yet cooks put them together in 124,287 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
Whipped whites trap air for lift, and yolks thicken and enrich the custard.
Flour
Starch thickens the milk mixture so it holds its shape around the air.
Butter
Fat adds richness and a smooth, tender texture to the base.
Milk
Forms the liquid base that the flour thickens and the eggs set in.
Sugar
Sweetens the custard and helps stabilise the beaten yolks.

The step that matters

Fold in the egg whites. Folding gently keeps the air in the whipped whites; stirring or deflating them causes the soufflé to rise poorly and turn dense.

“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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