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Plain Baked Custard

A custard made by baking beaten eggs with sweetened milk and vanilla extract.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 3 ingredients
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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 ↓

Plain Baked Custard

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).

Make the custard

  1. In a bowl, stir the well-beaten eggs into the sweetened milk.

  2. Add Price's extract to taste.

  3. Pour the mixture into a baking dish.

Bake

  1. Bake until the custard is smoothly thickened, but do not let it separate.

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).

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

What each ingredient does

Eggs
Proteins set as the custard heats, thickening the liquid into a tender, sliceable custard.
Sweetened milk
Provides the liquid base and sweetness, and its milk proteins help give the custard a creamy texture.

The step that matters

Bake until smoothly thickened, without separating. Egg proteins set gradually as the custard heats. Too much heat or baking too long can cause them to tighten and squeeze out liquid, leaving a curdled, watery texture. Stop when the custard is just set and still smooth.

“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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