Name: German Custard
Ingredients: 1 pint rich boiled custard; 1 ounce sweet almonds, blanched, roasted, and pounded; ½ ounce pine nuts or peanuts, blanched, roasted, and pounded; small quantity of candied citron, cut into thin slips

Why it works: Almond and pine match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 2% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 176 recipes. Both carry 2,3-pentanedione, which smells butter, sweet. The science ↓

German Custard

Ingredients

1 pint rich boiled custard
1 ounce sweet almonds, blanched, roasted, and pounded
½ ounce pine nuts or peanuts, blanched, roasted, and pounded
small quantity of candied citron, cut into thin slips

Directions

Make the custard

Add the pounded almonds and pine nuts to the boiled custard.
Stir in the candied citron.

Chill and serve

Chill the custard in the refrigerator for several hours before serving.

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.

Almond + pinetop 2% of all pairs

Smell alikestrong

Cooked together176 recipes

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

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

What each ingredient does

Sweet almonds: Add nutty flavour and a slightly firm, grainy texture to the custard.
Pine nuts: Add a rich, buttery nut flavour and a little crunch to the custard.
Rich boiled custard: Forms the creamy base that the nuts and citron are folded into.
Candied citron: Adds sweet, aromatic citrus flavour and chewy bits throughout the 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.