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Dessert

Boiled Custard

A sweet custard made by cooking milk and eggs with sugar, rum, and flavoring until smooth.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 6 ingredients
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Why it works: Milk and rum work together. They rank in the top 12% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 967 recipes. Both carry ethyl 2-methylbutyrate, which smells fruity, apple. The science ↓

Boiled Custard

Ingredients

Directions

Make the custard

  1. Scald the milk in a saucepan.

  2. In a bowl, beat the eggs and mix in the sugar.

  3. Add the scalded milk to the egg mixture.

  4. Pour everything into a double boiler and cook until smooth and creamy, or until the froth disappears.

Strain and flavor

  1. Strain the mixture through a fine sieve into a bowl that has been wet with cold water.

  2. Once cooled, add your chosen flavoring and a pinch of salt.

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 + rumtop 12% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together967 recipes

    Shared aroma: ethyl 2-methylbutyrate (fruity, apple).

  2. Sugar + rumtop 14% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together2,908 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. Egg + sugartop 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

Eggs
Thicken the custard as they cook, giving it a smooth, creamy body.
Milk
Forms the liquid base that the eggs thicken into a custard.
Sugar
Sweetens the custard and helps soften the egg proteins as they set.

The step that matters

Cooking in the double boiler. Gentle, indirect heat lets the egg proteins thicken slowly. Too much heat scrambles the eggs into lumps, so the custard should be stirred and watched until it coats a spoon and the froth disappears.

“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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