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Custard Pudding

A sweet custard made with milk, eggs, sugar, spices, and wine, baked until firm.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 12 ingredients
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Custard Pudding

Why it works: Lemon and orange match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 10,634 recipes. Both carry 3-hexenal, which smells apple, fruity. The science ↓

Custard Pudding

Ingredients

Directions

Flavor and sweeten the milk

  1. Flavor 1 pint of milk with the lemon peel, cinnamon, and bay leaf and boil the flavored milk.

  2. Strain the milk and sweeten it to taste.

  3. Beat 4 eggs and pour the milk into the beaten eggs.

  4. Pour the mixture into a mold.

  5. Boil the mixture for 30 minutes.

Make the thickened custard

  1. Boil 1 quart of milk until reduced to 1 pint.

  2. Cool a few spoonfuls of the reduced milk and mix with 1 tablespoon flour.

  3. Add the flour mixture to the boiling milk and stir until cool.

  4. Beat 4 yolks and 2 whites of eggs and strain the beaten eggs.

  5. Stir the strained eggs into the milk with 2 oz moist sugar, 2 or 3 tablespoons wine, and a little grated nutmeg.

Bake

  1. Bake for 1 hour or until firm and brown.

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.

Photo for illustrative purposes only · Contact us to use it

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. Lemon + orangetop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together10,634 recipes

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

  2. Cinnamon + orangetop 3% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together3,437 recipes

    Shared aroma: guaiacol (smoky, sweet).

  3. Lemon + cinnamontop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together7,950 recipes

    Shared aroma: beta-phellandrene (minty, terpene).

  4. Cinnamon + flourtop 9% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together17,341 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  5. Milk + cinnamontop 10% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together12,655 recipes

    Shared aroma: cuminaldehyde (Spicy, cumin).

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 body as they cook and coagulate with heat.
Milk
Forms the liquid base of the custard, which sets when the proteins coagulate.
Flour
Thickens the milk so the custard holds its shape rather than running.
Moist sugar
Adds sweetness and helps the top brown during baking.
Wine
Adds acidity and aromatic flavor to the custard.

The step that matters

Boil the mixture for 30 minutes. Egg proteins set and thicken as they heat, but overheating or boiling too hard can curdle or toughen the custard, so heat should be controlled.

Swap the orange

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

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

Fit is the average pairing score against milk, lemon, cinnamon, egg, sugar, flour, wine. 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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