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Dessert

Frozen Custard

A chilled dessert made from cream, milk, sugar, eggs, corn starch, gelatin, and flavoring, finished with nuts or cherries.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 8 ingredients
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Frozen Custard

Why it works: Cream and sugar are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 9% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 43,450 recipes. Both carry 2,3-butanedione, which smells butter, sweet. The science ↓

Frozen Custard

Ingredients

Directions

Make the custard

  1. Mix sugar, corn starch, and eggs in a bowl.

  2. Bring the milk to a boil and add the sugar mixture.

  3. Dissolve the gelatine in cold water and add it last.

  4. Cook the custard for five minutes, then let it cool.

Finish and freeze

  1. Combine the cooled custard with the cream and add flavoring to taste.

  2. Freeze the mixture.

  3. Before packing, stir in the chopped nuts or candied cherries.

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. Cream + sugartop 9% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together43,450 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2,3-butanedione (butter, sweet).

  2. Milk + corntop 10% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together6,955 recipes

    Shared aroma: hexanal (green, grassy).

  3. Corn + nutstop 12% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together104 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2,3-pentanedione (butter, sweet).

  4. Milk + nutstop 17% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together982 recipes

    Shared aroma: furaneol (caramel, strawberry).

  5. Cream + milktop 18% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together29,399 recipes

    Shared aroma: delta-dodecalactone (sweet, creamy).

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 set with heat, giving body to the base.
Corn starch
Thickens the custard so it holds body and resists ice crystals when frozen.
Gelatine
Adds firmness and stabilises the frozen texture, keeping it smooth rather than icy.
Cream
Supplies fat, which makes the frozen custard rich and creamy rather than hard.
Sugar
Sweetens the base and lowers the freezing point, keeping it softer when frozen.

The step that matters

Cook the custard for five minutes. Heating the egg and starch mixture long enough thickens it and cooks the eggs. Undercooked custard stays thin and can taste eggy, while overheating can curdle it.

Swap the nuts

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

  1. Almondfits better
  2. Peanutfits better
  3. Beansfits about as well
  4. Nutsthe original

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