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Dessert

Custard Souffle

A baked custard soufflé made with butter, flour, sugar, milk, eggs, and folded egg whites.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 5 ingredients
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Why it works: Butter and milk are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 7% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 81,283 recipes. Both carry (z)-4-heptenal, which smells biscuit, cream. The science ↓

Custard Souffle

Oven, in the book's wordsA moderate oven

Ingredients

Directions

Make the custard base

  1. Boil the milk in a saucepan.

  2. In a separate bowl, mix the flour and butter together.

  3. Gradually add the boiling milk to the flour mixture and cook for 8 minutes, stirring often.

  4. Beat the sugar and egg yolks together, then add to the cooked mixture and let it cool.

Bake and serve

  1. Once cool, beat the egg whites to stiff peaks and fold them into the mixture.

  2. Bake in a buttered pudding dish for 20 minutes.

  3. Serve immediately with sauce.

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. Butter + milktop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together81,283 recipes

    Shared aroma: (z)-4-heptenal (biscuit, cream).

  2. Butter + flourtop 12% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together124,287 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  3. Flour + milktop 14% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together78,219 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  4. Flour + sugartop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together92,116 recipes

    Shared aroma: phenylacetaldehyde (hawthorne, honey).

  5. Flour + eggtop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together106,462 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

Butter and flour barely smell alike, yet cooks put them together in 124,287 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
Yolks thicken the custard while whipped whites give the souffle its light, risen structure.
Butter
Fat that combines with flour to form a roux, adding richness and smooth texture.
Flour
Starch that thickens the milk into a stable base that holds the whipped whites.
Milk
Liquid that cooks with the flour into the custard base, adding moisture and body.
Sugar
Adds sweetness and helps stabilise the beaten egg yolks in the custard base.

The step that matters

Folding in the egg whites. Whites must be beaten to stiff peaks and folded gently, or they deflate. Air trapped in the whites is what lifts the souffle in the oven.

“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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