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Dessert

Very Good Old-fashioned Boiled Custard

A custard made by cooking milk, lemon rind, sugar, and egg yolks until thickened.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 5 ingredients
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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

Make the custard

  1. In a saucepan, combine milk and lemon rind. Heat until boiling.

  2. In a bowl, whisk together egg yolks and sugar until well mixed.

  3. Gradually add the hot milk mixture to the egg yolks, stirring constantly to prevent curdling.

  4. Return the mixture to the saucepan and cook over low heat, stirring gently until it thickens.

  5. Remove from heat and strain to remove lemon rind. Add salt and stir well.

Serve

  1. Serve warm or chilled.

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. Sugar + lemontop 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. Egg + lemontop 19% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together44,316 recipes

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

Sugar and lemon 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 during gentle cooking, and add richness.
Milk
Forms the liquid base that the egg yolks thicken into a custard.
Sugar
Sweetens the custard and helps keep the yolks smooth when whisked.
Lemon rind
Adds aromatic citrus flavour to the warm milk, then is strained out.

The step that matters

Adding the hot milk to the yolks. Pouring hot milk into yolks too quickly, without constant stirring, can scramble the eggs and cause curdling. Adding it gradually and stirring tempers the yolks so they thicken smoothly.

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.

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