Name: Almond Custard
Ingredients: 2 oz. almonds; 1 pint custard; vanilla extract to taste

Why it works: Almond and vanilla match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 4% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 3,961 recipes. Both carry eucalyptol, which smells eucalyptus, herbal. The science ↓

Almond Custard

Ingredients

2 oz. almonds
1 pint custard
vanilla extract to taste

Directions

Prepare the almonds

Blanch the almonds and rub them through a wire sieve.

Make the custard

Add the almond puree to the custard while it is cooking in the saucepan.
Flavor with vanilla extract.

Serve

Serve in custard glasses.

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.

Almond + vanillatop 4% of all pairs

Smell alikestrong

Cooked together3,961 recipes

Shared aroma: eucalyptol (eucalyptus, herbal).

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

What each ingredient does

Almonds: Provide the main almond flavor and a smooth, thickened body when pureed into the custard.
Custard: Forms the creamy base that the almond puree is stirred into.

“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.