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Dessert

Common Custard Pudding

A simple custard pudding made with eggs, milk, sugar, optional lemon brandy, served with fruit or sauce.

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

Common Custard Pudding

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the custard

  1. Whisk the eggs in a pint basin.

  2. Add enough milk to fill the basin.

  3. Strain the mixture, then sweeten with fine sugar.

Cook and serve

  1. Boil the pudding very softly for 30 minutes.

  2. Let it stand for a few minutes before serving.

  3. Serve with sifted sugar and sweet sauce, or with stewed fruit.

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

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

  2. Milk + curranttop 16% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together5,475 recipes

    Shared aroma: isoamyl acetate (banana, pear).

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

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

  4. Egg + milktop 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

Eggs
Set the custard into a soft, sliceable structure as they cook.
Milk
Provides the liquid base that the eggs thicken into a custard.
Fine sugar
Sweetens the custard and balances the richness of the eggs and milk.

The step that matters

Boil the pudding very softly. Egg proteins set at moderate heat, but a hard boil causes them to curdle and turn the custard grainy and watery. A gentle heat keeps it smooth and tender.

Swap the lemon

The recipe marks lemon as optional. How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (egg, milk, sugar, currant):

  1. Vanillafits better
  2. Raisinfits better
  3. Figfits better
  4. Lemonthe original

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