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Dessert

Custard Pudding

Custard pudding made with milk, lemon peel, cinnamon, bay leaf, eggs, flour, sugar, orange‑flower water, wine, and nutmeg, boiled or baked.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 11 ingredients
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Custard Pudding

Why it works: Lemon and orange match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 10,634 recipes. Both carry 3-hexenal, which smells apple, fruity. The science ↓

Custard Pudding

Ingredients

Directions

Flavor and thicken the milk

  1. Flavor the milk with lemon peel, cinnamon, and bay leaf.

  2. Boil the flavored milk.

  3. Strain the milk.

  4. Sweeten the milk to taste.

  5. Cool a few spoonfuls of milk and mix with 1 tablespoon flour.

  6. Add the flour mixture to the boiling milk and stir until cool.

Make the custard and bake

  1. Beat the eggs and mix with the milk.

  2. Beat 4 egg yolks and 2 egg whites.

  3. Strain the beaten eggs.

  4. Mix the strained eggs with the milk, sugar, wine, and nutmeg.

  5. Pour the mixture into a mold and boil for 1 hour.

  6. Bake for 1 hour or until firm and brown.

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.

Photo for illustrative purposes only · Contact us to use it

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. Lemon + orangetop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together10,634 recipes

    Shared aroma: 3-hexenal (apple, fruity).

  2. Cinnamon + orangetop 3% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together3,437 recipes

    Shared aroma: guaiacol (smoky, sweet).

  3. Lemon + cinnamontop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together7,950 recipes

    Shared aroma: beta-phellandrene (minty, terpene).

  4. Cinnamon + flourtop 9% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together17,341 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  5. Milk + cinnamontop 10% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together12,655 recipes

    Shared aroma: cuminaldehyde (Spicy, cumin).

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 firm, sliceable body as they cook.
Milk
Forms the liquid base that the eggs set into a custard.
Flour
Thickens the milk so the custard holds its body.
Moist sugar
Sweetens the custard and adds a soft, rich flavour.

The step that matters

Adding the flour mixture to the boiling milk. Flour thickens only when starch granules are hydrated and heated, and lumps form if the flour is added to hot milk without first being smoothed in cooler milk. Stirring keeps the thickening even.

Swap the orange

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (milk, lemon, cinnamon, egg, flour, sugar, wine):

  1. Vanillafits better
  2. Raisinfits better
  3. Figfits about as well
  4. Orangethe original

Fit is the average pairing score against milk, lemon, cinnamon, egg, flour, sugar, wine. 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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