Skip to main content
Dessert

Caramel Custards

A custard made with milk, eggs, sugar, lemon rind, and caramel, baked in a water bath.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 5 ingredients
Jump to recipe ↓

Why it works: Milk and lemon are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 15% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 19,053 recipes. Both carry 2-nonenal, which smells fatty, green. The science ↓

Caramel Custards

serves 6

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.

Prepare the custard

  1. Put three drops of caramel into the bottoms of six cups.

  2. Boil 1 pint of milk with 2 oz of sugar and half the yellow rind of a lemon.

  3. Beat 4 eggs.

  4. Strain the milk into the eggs. Mix thoroughly. Strain again.

  5. Pour into the cups.

  6. Set the cups in a baking pan with hot water halfway up the sides.

Bake and serve

  1. Either set the pan over the fire until the custards are firm or bake in the oven at 350°F (175°C) for 12 to 15 minutes.

  2. Cool the custards.

  3. Turn them out onto saucers; serve 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. Milk + lemontop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together19,053 recipes

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

  2. Sugar + lemontop 18% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together53,532 recipes

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

  3. Milk + eggtop 18% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together88,785 recipes

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

  4. Milk + sugartop 18% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together77,875 recipes

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

  5. Egg + lemontop 19% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together44,316 recipes

    Shared aroma: (e,e)-2,4-decadienal (fatty, deep fried).

Sugar and lemon barely smell alike, yet cooks put them together in 53,532 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
Set the custard into a firm, sliceable structure as they cook.
Milk
Forms the liquid base of the custard, giving it a soft, creamy texture.
Sugar
Sweetens the custard and helps the caramel flavour carry through.
Caramel
Coats the cup bottoms, forming a sauce that becomes the topping when inverted.

The step that matters

Setting the custards in the hot water bath. Eggs set into a delicate custard only when heated gently. Too much heat makes the custard curdle or turn rubbery, so the water should stay hot, not boiling, and the custards should be removed once just firm.

Swap the lemon

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

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

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

More caramel custard recipes

Pudding 3Soft 3 See all 133 →

You might also like

Lemon CakeLemon Cake228 recipesLemon IceLemon Ice147 recipesLemon SherbetLemon Sherbet103 recipesLemon CustardLemon Custard64 recipes