Skip to main content
Dessert

Wellington Custard

A custard made with milk, isinglass, lemon peel, cinnamon, sugar, egg yolks, and ratafia.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 7 ingredients
Jump to recipe ↓

Why it works: Lemon and cinnamon match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 7% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 7,950 recipes. Both carry beta-phellandrene, which smells minty, terpene. The science ↓

Wellington Custard

Ingredients

Directions

Make the custard

  1. Boil the milk with isinglass, lemon peel, cinnamon, and lump sugar for 1-2 minutes.

  2. Beat the egg yolks in a bowl.

  3. Pour the hot milk into the egg yolks while stirring continuously.

  4. Strain the mixture through a fine sieve.

  5. Add a few drops of ratafia.

  6. Stir often until the mixture thickens.

Set

  1. Pour into a mould, preferably earthenware.

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

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

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

    Shared aroma: cuminaldehyde (Spicy, cumin).

  3. Cinnamon + sugartop 10% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together30,779 recipes

    Shared aroma: guaiacol (smoky, sweet).

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

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

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

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

Cinnamon and sugar barely smell alike, yet cooks put them together in 30,779 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

Milk
Forms the liquid base of the custard and carries the flavour of the infusions.
Isinglass
Gelatine-like fish protein that sets the custard as it cools.
Egg yolks
Thicken the custard through heat-set proteins and add richness.
Lump sugar
Sweetens the custard and softens the set slightly.

The step that matters

Stir often until the mixture thickens. Egg yolks thicken when heated gently but can scramble if the heat is too high or the mixture sits still. Constant stirring keeps the custard smooth and even as it thickens.

Swap the lemon

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

  1. Vanillafits better
  2. Raisinfits better
  3. Figfits better
  4. Lemonthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against milk, cinnamon, 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.

You might also like

Lemon CakeLemon Cake228 recipesLemon IceLemon Ice147 recipesLemon SherbetLemon Sherbet103 recipesCinnamon RollsCinnamon Rolls71 recipes