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Dessert

Fruit and Nut Custard

A custard made with milk, grape juice, sugar, nuts, raisins, and liquid rennet.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 6 ingredients
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Why it works: Nuts and raisin work together. They rank in the top 10% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 490 recipes. Both carry decanal, which smells soap, orange peel. The science ↓

Fruit and Nut Custard

Ingredients

Directions

Make the custard

  1. In a lukewarm bowl, combine the milk, grape juice, sugar, and liquid rennet.

  2. Place the Protoid nuts and raisins in custard cups.

  3. Pour the milk mixture over the nuts and raisins.

Serve

  1. Allow to cool and serve with whipped cream.

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. Nuts + raisintop 10% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together490 recipes

    Shared aroma: decanal (soap, orange peel).

  2. Milk + grapetop 12% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together2,682 recipes

    Shared aroma: 1-hexanal (fruit).

  3. Sugar + raisintop 13% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together12,481 recipes

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

  4. Milk + raisintop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together7,155 recipes

    Shared aroma: decanoic acid (acides aroma).

  5. Milk + nutstop 17% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together982 recipes

    Shared aroma: furaneol (caramel, strawberry).

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

What each ingredient does

Milk
Forms the body of the custard once set by the rennet.
Liquid rennet
Coagulates the milk proteins so the mixture sets into a custard.
Sugar
Adds sweetness and balances the tartness of the grape juice.
Grape juice
Adds fruit flavour and a little acidity to the milk base.
Raisins
Add chewy texture and concentrated sweetness to each custard cup.

The step that matters

Combining the milk mixture with rennet in a lukewarm bowl. Rennet works best at a lukewarm temperature. If the milk is too hot, the enzyme can be damaged and the custard may fail to set; if it is too cold, coagulation is slow. Stir the ingredients evenly before pouring so the set is uniform.

Swap the grape

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

  1. Vanillafits better
  2. Figfits better
  3. Coconutfits better
  4. Grapethe original

Fit is the average pairing score against milk, sugar, nuts, raisin. 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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