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Custard Ice Cream

Custard ice cream made with milk, egg yolks, sugar, and optional rose or lemon flavoring.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 6 ingredients
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Why it works: Rose and lemon are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 13% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 1,174 recipes. Both carry decanal, which smells soap, orange peel. The science ↓

Custard Ice Cream

Ingredients

Directions

Make the custard

  1. Boil the milk in a saucepan.

  2. In a bowl, beat the egg yolks and mix in the sugar.

  3. Pour the boiling milk over the egg and sugar mixture while stirring.

  4. Return the mixture to the heat and cook until it thickens slightly.

Flavour and finish

  1. Season with rose or peach water, or add the lemon peel and juice if using lemon.

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. Rose + lemontop 13% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together1,174 recipes

    Shared aroma: decanal (soap, orange peel).

  2. Milk + lemontop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together19,053 recipes

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

  3. Sugar + lemontop 18% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together53,532 recipes

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

  4. Milk + eggtop 18% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together88,785 recipes

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

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

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

Sugar and lemon barely smell alike, yet cooks put them together in 53,532 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

Egg yolks
Thicken the custard and add richness as they set gently with heat.
Whole milk
Forms the liquid base of the custard, adding creaminess and body.
White sugar
Sweetens the base and softens the texture of the frozen custard.

The step that matters

Cooking the custard after adding the milk. Egg yolks thicken as they heat, but if the mixture gets too hot it can curdle or scramble. Cook gently and stir constantly until it just thickens slightly.

Swap the lemon

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

  1. Vanillafits better
  2. Lemonthe original
  3. Raspberryfits about as well
  4. Figfits about as well

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