Skip to main content
Dessert

Very Good Old-fashioned Boiled Custard

A custard made by infusing lemon rind in milk, adding sugar and egg yolks, then cooking over a water bath.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 5 ingredients
Jump to recipe ↓

Why it works: Milk and lemon are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 15% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 19,053 recipes. Both carry 2-nonenal, which smells fatty, green. The science ↓

Very Good Old-fashioned Boiled Custard

Ingredients

Directions

Infuse the milk

  1. Infuse the lemon rind in the milk for 30 minutes.

  2. Simmer the milk and lemon together for a few minutes.

  3. Add the sugar to the mixture.

  4. Remove the lemon peel.

Make the custard

  1. Beat the egg yolks.

  2. Mix the beaten yolks with the additional milk.

  3. Stir the boiling milk quickly into the egg mixture.

  4. Pour the custard into a deep jug.

  5. Place the jug over boiling water.

  6. Stir gently until it thickens.

  7. Stir more quickly, ensuring the spoon touches the bottom, until it nearly boils.

  8. Remove from heat immediately to prevent curdling.

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 + lemontop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together19,053 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-nonenal (fatty, green).

  2. Lemon + sugartop 18% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together53,532 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-nonenal (fatty, green).

  3. Milk + eggtop 18% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together88,785 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-nonenal (fatty, green).

  4. Milk + sugartop 18% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together77,875 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-nonenal (fatty, green).

  5. Lemon + eggtop 19% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together44,316 recipes

    Shared aroma: (e,e)-2,4-decadienal (fatty, deep fried).

Lemon and sugar barely smell alike, yet cooks put them together in 53,532 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 as they set with gentle heat, giving it body and richness.
Milk
Forms the liquid base of the custard and carries the flavour of the lemon.
White sugar
Sweetens the custard and balances the richness of the egg yolks.

The step that matters

Remove from heat immediately to prevent curdling. Egg proteins set with heat and can scramble into lumps if overheated. Thickening stops as soon as the custard nears boiling, so pull it off the heat at that point.

Swap the lemon

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

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

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

More boiled custard recipes

Pudding 12Rich 6 See all 257 →

You might also like

Lemon CakeLemon Cake228 recipesLemon IceLemon Ice147 recipesLemon SherbetLemon Sherbet103 recipesLemon CustardLemon Custard64 recipes