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Dessert

Plainer Custards

A custard made with milk, sugar, egg yolks, ground rice, and flavored with bay leaf and bitter almonds.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 7 ingredients
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Why it works: Almond and cinnamon match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 3,514 recipes. Both carry eucalyptol, which smells eucalyptus, herbal. The science ↓

Plainer Custards

Ingredients

Directions

Make the custard

  1. Boil the milk with the bay leaf, bitter almonds, and sugar.

  2. Wet the ground rice with a little milk.

  3. Stir the wet ground rice into the boiling milk.

  4. Beat the egg yolks in a bowl.

  5. Pour the hot milk mixture over the egg yolks while stirring continuously.

  6. Remove the bay leaf once cooled.

Serve

  1. Fill cups with the mixture.

  2. Sprinkle with cinnamon or nutmeg.

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. Almond + cinnamontop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together3,514 recipes

    Shared aroma: eucalyptol (eucalyptus, herbal).

  2. Rice + cinnamontop 4% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together2,137 recipes

    Shared aroma: guaiacol (smoky, sweet).

  3. Almond + ricetop 6% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together1,456 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2,4-decadienal (seaweed).

  4. Milk + ricetop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together7,374 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-nonenal (fatty, 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

Egg yolks
Thicken the custard as they set and add richness and a smooth texture.
Ground rice
Thickens the milk and helps keep the custard smooth and stable.
Milk
Forms the liquid base that the eggs and rice thicken into custard.
Sugar
Adds sweetness and balances the richness of the egg yolks.

The step that matters

Pour the hot milk over the egg yolks while stirring continuously. Adding hot liquid to yolks too quickly can scramble them. Constant stirring spreads the heat evenly so the yolks warm gently and the custard thickens smoothly instead of curdling.

“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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