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Dessert

Cold Custard

A chilled milk custard sweetened and flavored, set with rennet wine, served with sugar and cream.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 4 ingredients
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Cold Custard

Why it works: Milk and sugar are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 18% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 77,875 recipes. Both carry 2-nonenal, which smells fatty, green. The science ↓

Cold Custard

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare

  1. Warm the milk until it is just warm to the touch.

  2. Sweeten and flavor the milk to your taste.

Set and serve

  1. Pour the mixture into a serving dish.

  2. Stir in the rennet wine and let it stand for about one hour.

  3. Serve with sugar and 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.

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

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

  2. Milk + winetop 19% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together3,116 recipes

    Shared aroma: sotolon (fenugreek, curry).

  3. Sugar + winetop 31% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together9,581 recipes

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

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 body of the custard as its proteins set into a soft curd.
Rennet wine
Contains rennet, an enzyme that makes the milk coagulate and set into a custard.
Sugar
Adds sweetness to the milk and to the finished custard.

The step that matters

Stir in the rennet at just warm temperature. Rennet is an enzyme, and excessive heat denatures it, so the milk may fail to set. Milk that is only just warm lets the enzyme work and form a smooth, tender curd.

“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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