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Dessert

Peach Custard

A custard dessert made with peaches, wine, sugar, eggs, lemon zest, and whipped egg whites, baked and served cold with cream.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 10 ingredients
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Why it works: Sugar and cream are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 9% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 43,450 recipes. Both carry 2,3-butanedione, which smells butter, sweet. The science ↓

Peach 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 peaches

  1. Blanch a few peach kernels and stew them with the peaches in wine, adding sugar to taste.

Make the custard

  1. Beat the egg yolks with 1 cup of sugar until well combined. Grate the lemon zest and mix it into the yolk mixture.

  2. Whip the egg whites to stiff peaks and fold half into the yolk mixture.

  3. Remove the peaches from heat and pour them into a pudding dish.

  4. Pour the batter over the peaches and bake at 350°F (175°C) until brown.

Top and serve

  1. Cover with the remaining whipped egg whites, sweetened with powdered sugar, and brown slightly.

  2. Serve cold with cream, optionally lined with macaroons or ladyfingers.

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 + creamtop 9% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together43,450 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2,3-butanedione (butter, sweet).

  2. Peach + lemontop 12% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together947 recipes

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

  3. Wine + lemontop 13% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together6,157 recipes

    Shared aroma: decanal (soap, orange peel).

  4. Peach + winetop 14% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together218 recipes

    Shared aroma: hexanal (green, grassy).

  5. Peach + sugartop 17% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together2,308 recipes

    Shared aroma: beta-damascenone (apple, rose).

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

What each ingredient does

Peaches
Provide the fruit base and flavour that the custard sits on.
Egg yolks
Enrich the custard and help it set into a rich, tender texture.
Egg whites
Whipped to form a light foam that gives the batter and topping lift and airiness.
Sugar
Sweetens the custard and stabilises the whipped egg white foam.
Wine
Stews the peaches, adding moisture and a light acidic, aromatic note.

The step that matters

Folding half the whipped egg whites into the yolks. Folding gently keeps the foam's air intact; stirring or deflating it makes the batter dense and flat instead of light after baking.

Swap the peach

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

  1. Vanillafits better
  2. Raspberryfits better
  3. Orangefits better
  4. Peachthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against wine, sugar, egg, lemon, cream. 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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