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Dessert

French Custard

A custard made by boiling milk with sugar and flavor, adding egg whites and yolks, then thickening and garnishing with jelly.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 6 ingredients
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French Custard

Why it works: Milk and peach work together. They rank in the top 10% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 781 recipes. Both carry phellandrene, which smells minty. The science ↓

French Custard

Ingredients

Directions

Make the custard

  1. Sweeten the milk with loaf sugar and flavor with peach or vanilla.

  2. Pour the milk into a flat saucepan and bring to a boil.

  3. Beat the egg whites until frothy.

  4. Once the milk boils, drop spoonfuls of the egg whites into the milk until they harden slightly.

  5. Carefully skim the egg whites off and place them on a dish.

  6. Beat the egg yolks and stir them into the boiling milk until it thickens.

Serve

  1. Pour the thickened milk over the egg whites and garnish with bits of colored jelly or marmalade.

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. Milk + peachtop 10% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together781 recipes

    Shared aroma: phellandrene (minty).

  2. Sugar + peachtop 17% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together2,308 recipes

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

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

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

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

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

  5. Sugar + eggtop 21% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together122,807 recipes

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

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 that the yolks thicken.
Egg yolks
Thicken the boiling milk into a smooth, rich custard as they set.
Egg whites
Form soft, lightly set spoonfuls that float in the custard as a delicate texture.
Loaf sugar
Sweetens the milk to taste.

The step that matters

Stirring the yolks into the boiling milk. Egg yolks thicken as their proteins set with heat, but if they overheat or curdle they turn grainy. Stirring steadily while the milk is boiling helps them thicken evenly into a smooth custard.

Swap the peach

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

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

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