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Dessert

Caramel Custard

A custard made with eggs, milk, sugar, and lemon essence, baked in a caramel-coated mold.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 5 ingredients
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Caramel Custard

Why it works: Milk and lemon are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 15% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 19,053 recipes. Both carry 2-nonenal, which smells fatty, green. The science ↓

Caramel Custard

Oven, in the book's wordsA slow oven

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the mold

  1. Butter a plain tin pudding mold.

  2. In a small saucepan, heat ½ cup sugar until it turns brown like coffee, then pour it into the mold, coating the bottom.

Make the custard

  1. Beat the eggs and sugar together until well mixed, then add the milk and lemon essence.

  2. Pour the mixture into the prepared mold and cover with buttered paper.

Steam and serve

  1. In a large saucepan, add 1 inch of boiling water and place a saucer at the bottom.

  2. Set the pudding mold on the saucer and cover the pan with a lid.

  3. Steam slowly for at least 1 hour without boiling.

  4. Turn out and serve hot or cold.

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.

Photo for illustrative purposes only · Contact us to use it

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

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

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

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

  3. Egg + milktop 18% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together88,785 recipes

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

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

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

  5. Egg + lemontop 19% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together44,316 recipes

    Shared aroma: (e,e)-2,4-decadienal (fatty, deep fried).

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

Eggs
Set the custard into a firm, sliceable structure as they cook.
Milk
Provides the liquid base and softness that makes the custard tender.
Sugar
Sweetens the custard and, caramelised, forms the brown syrup coating the mold.

The step that matters

Steaming without boiling. If the water boils hard, the steam and bubbling can make the custard full of holes or rough in texture. Gentle, steady steam cooks the egg proteins evenly so the custard stays smooth and set.

Swap the lemon

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

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

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