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Caramel Custard Pudding

A custard pudding made with caramelized sugar, eggs, milk, and sugar, baked until set.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 5 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 ↓

Caramel Custard Pudding

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.

Make the caramel

  1. Brown 2 cups of granulated sugar in a skillet over medium heat until light brown.

  2. Pour in ½ cup of water and let it boil down to a syrup.

  3. Let the syrup cool, then beat 6 eggs lightly.

Make the custard

  1. Add 1½ pints of sweet milk and ⅓ cup of sugar to the cooled syrup.

  2. Pour the mixture into a pudding dish and place it in a larger pan filled with water.

Bake and serve

  1. Bake at 350°F (175°C) for about 25 minutes, or until set like custard.

  2. Serve with whipped cream.

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

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

  3. Sugar + eggtop 21% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together122,807 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

Granulated sugar
Browns into caramel for color and flavor, then sweetens the custard.
Eggs
Set as they heat, giving the custard its firm, sliceable structure.
Sweet milk
Forms the liquid base of the custard, adding moisture and richness.

The step that matters

Browning the sugar. Sugar moves from light brown to burnt within moments. Over-darkened caramel turns bitter and can spoil the whole custard, so watch closely and stop at light brown.

“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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