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Dessert

Confederate Boiled Custard

A custard made by boiling eggs, sweet milk, molasses, and baking soda.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 4 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 ↓

Confederate Boiled Custard

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare

  1. In a bowl, beat the egg yolks until smooth.

  2. Add the molasses to the yolks and mix well.

  3. In a separate pot, heat the sweet milk until warm.

  4. Just before adding the yolk mixture to the milk, stir in the baking soda.

Make the custard

  1. Combine the yolk mixture with the warm milk, stirring continuously until thickened.

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 + molassestop 21% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together7,243 recipes

    Shared aroma: furaneol (caramel, strawberry).

  3. Egg + molassestop 34% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together6,879 recipes

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

What each ingredient does

Eggs
Yolks thicken the custard as they heat and set, giving it body.
Sweet milk
Forms the liquid base that the yolks thicken into a custard.
Molasses
Adds sweetness and a dark, rich flavour and colour.
Baking soda
Reacts with the molasses' acidity, lightening colour and softening the flavour.

The step that matters

Combining the yolks with the warm milk. Stirring continuously keeps the egg yolks moving so they heat gently and evenly. If they get too hot in one spot, they can scramble instead of thickening smoothly.

“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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