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Dessert

Apple Custard

A baked custard made with apples, lemon peel, sugar, eggs, milk, and nutmeg.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 7 ingredients
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Why it works: Lemon and nutmeg match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 5% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 11,318 recipes. Both carry beta-phellandrene, which smells minty, terpene. The science ↓

Apple 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 the apples

  1. Pare, core, and quarter the apples.

  2. Add the grated lemon peel and stew the apples in a small amount of water until tender.

  3. Mash the stewed apples until smooth; you should have about 1½ pints.

  4. Mix in the sugar and let it cool.

Make the custard

  1. Beat the eggs until light and stir them into the milk, alternating with the cooled apple mixture.

Bake and serve

  1. Pour the mixture into cups or a deep dish and bake at 350°F (175°C) for 20 minutes.

  2. Serve cold, topped with grated nutmeg.

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. Lemon + nutmegtop 5% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together11,318 recipes

    Shared aroma: beta-phellandrene (minty, terpene).

  2. Apple + milktop 11% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together4,104 recipes

    Shared aroma: 4-heptenal (creamy, biscuit).

  3. Apple + nutmegtop 12% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together3,790 recipes

    Shared aroma: estragole (anise, licorice).

  4. Apple + lemontop 14% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together7,551 recipes

    Shared aroma: trans-2-nonenal (cardboard, fatty).

  5. Lemon + milktop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together19,053 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
Set the custard as they cook, giving it a soft, sliceable body.
Milk
Provides the liquid base and richness that the eggs set into a custard.
Apples
Supply the main flavour and a soft, moist texture once stewed and mashed.
Sugar
Adds sweetness and helps balance the tartness of the apples.

The step that matters

Let the apple mixture cool before combining. Adding hot apple purée to beaten eggs can start cooking them unevenly and cause curdling. Cooling it first keeps the custard smooth and evenly set when baked.

Swap the apple

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

  1. Vanillafits better
  2. Orangefits better
  3. Figfits better
  4. Applethe original

Fit is the average pairing score against lemon, sugar, egg, milk, nutmeg. 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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