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Dessert

Custard for Ice Puddings

A custard mixture for making ice puddings, flavored with vanilla, lemon, or other extracts, and optionally containing fruit or ginger.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 6 ingredients
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Why it works: Milk and vanilla are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 5% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 19,187 recipes. Both carry ethyl caproate, which smells fruity, apple peel. The science ↓

Custard for Ice Puddings

Ingredients

Directions

Make the custard

  1. In a saucepan, combine milk, cream, and egg yolks.

  2. Warm the mixture over low heat, stirring constantly until it thickens to a custard consistency; do not let it boil.

  3. Remove from heat and stir in powdered sugar and your choice of flavoring.

  4. Strain the mixture through a sieve.

  5. Add any desired fruits or ginger to the mixture.

Freeze and serve

  1. Pour the mixture into a freezing pot surrounded by a mixture of ice and salt.

  2. Stir the mixture continuously until it is smooth and fully frozen.

  3. Transfer the frozen mixture to a chilled pudding mold, close it, and store it in ice until ready to serve.

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 + vanillatop 5% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together19,187 recipes

    Shared aroma: ethyl caproate (fruity, apple peel).

  2. Sugar + vanillatop 8% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together35,032 recipes

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

  3. Cream + sugartop 9% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together43,450 recipes

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

  4. Vanilla + gingertop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together1,110 recipes

    Shared aroma: eucalyptol (eucalyptus, herbal).

  5. Cream + vanillatop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together12,301 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-nonanone (fruity, floral).

Sugar and vanilla barely smell alike, yet cooks put them together in 35,032 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

Egg yolks
Thicken the custard on gentle heating and give it a rich, smooth body.
Cream
Adds fat that makes the frozen pudding smooth and creamy rather than icy.
Milk
Provides the liquid base that the egg yolks thicken into custard.
Powdered sugar
Sweetens the custard and dissolves easily into the warm mixture.

The step that matters

Warm the mixture without boiling. Egg yolks thicken through gentle heat; if the mixture boils, the proteins scramble and the custard turns grainy and curdled instead of smooth.

Swap the ginger

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

  1. Cinnamonfits better
  2. Nutmegfits better
  3. Peppermintfits better
  4. Gingerthe original

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