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Baked Custard Pudding

A custard pudding made with eggs, milk, and sugar baked until set.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
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Why it works: Egg and milk are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 18% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 88,785 recipes. Both carry 2-nonenal, which smells fatty, green. The science ↓

Baked Custard Pudding

Ingredients

Directions

The book gives no oven temperature. The 350°F (175°C) in the steps was added when the recipe was transcribed, as a starting point.

Prepare

  1. Preheat the oven to 350°F (175°C).

  2. Beat the eggs very well in a bowl.

Make the custard

  1. Add the milk and sifted sugar to the eggs and mix until combined.

  2. Pour the mixture into a deep dish.

Bake and serve

  1. Bake for 20 minutes.

  2. Serve with preserves if desired.

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. Egg + milktop 18% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together88,785 recipes

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

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

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

  3. 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
Set the custard into a tender, sliceable structure as they cook.
Milk
Provides the liquid base that the eggs thicken into a smooth custard.
Sifted sugar
Adds sweetness and dissolves evenly into the milk and egg mixture.

The step that matters

Bake for 20 minutes. Eggs set as their proteins coagulate with heat. Too long or too hot can make the custard curdle, weep, or turn rubbery, so check it is just set before removing it from the oven.

“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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