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Baked or Steamed Caramel Custard

A custard made with caramelized sugar and milk, baked or steamed in a butter‑greased mold.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 4 ingredients
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Why it works: Milk and butter 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 ↓

Baked or Steamed Caramel Custard

Ingredients

Directions

Make the caramel

  1. Combine sugar and water in a saucepan.

  2. Heat until the sugar melts and turns into caramel.

  3. Add the caramel to hot milk and mix well.

Assemble and steam

  1. Grease a mold with butter.

  2. Pour the mixture into the mold.

  3. Steam the mold until the custard is set.

Serve

  1. Serve warm or cold, optionally with caramel sauce.

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

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

  2. Sugar + buttertop 17% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together98,233 recipes

    Shared aroma: guaiacol (smoky, sweet).

  3. Sugar + milktop 18% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together77,875 recipes

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

Sugar and milk barely smell alike, yet cooks put them together in 77,875 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

Sugar
Melts and caramelizes to give the custard its deep, slightly bitter sweetness and color.
Milk
Provides the liquid base and dairy proteins that set into a smooth, tender custard.
Water
Dissolves the sugar so it can melt evenly into caramel without scorching too quickly.

The step that matters

Heating the sugar to caramel. Sugar can go from amber to burnt very quickly. Burnt caramel tastes bitter, so it should be removed from heat as soon as it reaches a rich golden color.

“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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