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Dessert

Health Dessert

A custard dessert made with sweet milk, butter, eggs, sugar, flavoring, and strawberries, served chilled with cream.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 8 ingredients
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Why it works: Milk and butter are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 7% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 81,283 recipes. Both carry (z)-4-heptenal, which smells biscuit, cream. The science ↓

Health Dessert

Ingredients

Directions

Make the custard

  1. Heat the sweet milk and butter in a saucepan until boiling.

  2. Whisk in the egg yolks, being careful not to let it boil to avoid curdling.

  3. Once thickened, remove from heat and stir in the beaten egg whites.

  4. Sweeten and flavor to taste.

Assemble and serve

  1. Fill cups loosely with strawberries and pour the custard over them.

  2. Serve chilled with cream and sugar.

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 + buttertop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together81,283 recipes

    Shared aroma: (z)-4-heptenal (biscuit, cream).

  2. Butter + creamtop 8% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together41,516 recipes

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

  3. Sugar + creamtop 9% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together43,450 recipes

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

  4. Butter + eggtop 17% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together118,967 recipes

    Shared aroma: decanal (soap, orange peel).

  5. Butter + sugartop 17% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together98,233 recipes

    Shared aroma: guaiacol (smoky, sweet).

Ranks compare each pair with 20,000 random ingredient pairs on CompKitchen. How we score pairs

What each ingredient does

Egg yolks
Thicken the custard as they set with gentle heat, giving it a rich body.
Egg whites
Beaten in at the end, they add lightness and an airy texture to the custard.
Sweet milk
Forms the liquid base of the custard that the eggs thicken.

The step that matters

Whisking the egg yolks into the hot milk. If the mixture boils, the egg proteins overcook and curdle, leaving a grainy texture instead of a smooth custard. Keep the heat moderate and stir constantly.

“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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