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Dessert

Boiled Custard, or Mock Cream

A thickened milk custard made with eggs, cornstarch, and sugar, served cold as an ice cream substitute.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 7 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 ↓

Boiled Custard, or Mock Cream

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare

  1. Heat the milk in a saucepan until nearly boiling.

  2. Dissolve the cornstarch in a little cold milk and add it to the heated milk.

  3. In a bowl, beat the eggs with the powdered sugar until well combined.

Make the custard

  1. Stir the egg mixture into the milk and cornstarch mixture.

  2. Let it boil once or twice while stirring briskly until thickened.

  3. Remove from heat and add your choice of flavoring.

Serve

  1. Serve very cold as a substitute for ice cream.

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. Milk + lemontop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together19,053 recipes

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

  3. Butter + lemontop 16% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together41,227 recipes

    Shared aroma: 3-hexenal (apple, fruity).

  4. Egg + buttertop 17% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together118,967 recipes

    Shared aroma: decanal (soap, orange peel).

  5. Butter + sugartop 17% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together98,233 recipes

    Shared aroma: guaiacol (smoky, sweet).

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

What each ingredient does

Cornstarch
Thickens the milk into a smooth custard as its starch swells when heated.
Eggs
Add richness and help thicken the custard as they set with gentle heat.
Milk
Forms the liquid base that the cornstarch and eggs thicken into custard.
Powdered sugar
Adds sweetness and dissolves easily into the beaten eggs.

The step that matters

Let it boil once or twice while stirring briskly until thickened. Egg proteins can curdle if the custard gets too hot or is not stirred. Stirring keeps heat even, and the cornstarch needs a brief boil to reach full thickness.

Swap the lemon

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

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

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

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