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Baked or Steamed Caramel Custard

A custard made by stirring a sugar and water caramel into hot milk, then steaming or baking it.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 3 ingredients
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Why it works: Sugar and milk are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 18% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 77,875 recipes. Both carry 2-nonenal, which smells fatty, green. The science ↓

Baked or Steamed Caramel Custard

Ingredients

Directions

Make the caramel

  1. In a saucepan, combine sugar and water to make a caramel.

  2. Melt the sugar over medium heat until it turns golden brown.

Make the custard

  1. Add the caramel to the hot milk and stir well.

  2. Pour the mixture into a buttered mold.

  3. Steam the mold until the custard is set.

Serve

  1. Serve warm or cold, optionally with caramel sauce.

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. Sugar + milktop 18% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together77,875 recipes

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

Sugar and milk 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

Sugar
Melts into caramel that gives the custard its color, aroma and sweetness.
Hot milk
Forms the liquid base of the custard, providing moisture and a creamy texture.

The step that matters

Melt the sugar until golden brown. Sugar darkens quickly once it passes golden, turning bitter and burnt. Removing it at golden brown keeps the caramel sweet and flavorful.

“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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