Skip to main content
Dessert

Nice Boiled Custard

A custard made by boiling milk, folding beaten egg whites and yolks, flavored with rose, lemon, or peach leaf.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 4 ingredients
Jump to recipe ↓

Why it works: Milk and egg are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 18% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 88,785 recipes. Both carry 2-nonenal, which smells fatty, green. The science ↓

Nice Boiled Custard

Ingredients

Directions

Make the custard

  1. Heat the milk in a saucepan until it boils.

  2. Beat the egg whites with ½ cup of sugar until soft peaks form.

  3. Drop the beaten egg whites into the boiling milk for 2 minutes.

  4. Remove the egg whites with a skimmer and set aside to cool.

  5. Beat the egg yolks with the remaining sugar until well combined.

  6. Stir the yolk mixture into the boiling milk.

  7. Add your choice of flavoring to the custard.

Strain and serve

  1. Strain the custard through a sieve into a serving bowl.

  2. Top the custard with the cooled egg whites.

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

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

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

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

  3. Egg + sugartop 21% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together122,807 recipes

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

  4. Sugar + rosetop 25% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together3,584 recipes

    Shared aroma: beta-damascenone (apple, rose).

  5. Milk + rosetop 26% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together1,249 recipes

    Shared aroma: decanal (soap, orange peel).

Milk and sugar 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

Milk
Forms the liquid base of the custard and carries the flavor.
Eggs
Egg yolks thicken the custard as they heat, while whipped whites add a light topping.
White sugar
Sweetens the custard and helps stabilize the beaten egg whites.

The step that matters

Stir the yolk mixture into the boiling milk. Egg yolks can scramble if they meet very hot milk too fast or are not stirred constantly. Adding them gradually while stirring, and keeping the custard heated only until it thickens, helps it stay smooth and silky.

“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 boiled custard recipes

Pudding 12Rich 6 See all 257 →

You might also like

White CakeWhite Cake431 recipesPound CakePound Cake373 recipesOrange Bundt CakeOrange Bundt Cake349 recipesSpice CakeSpice Cake344 recipes