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Custard Sippets

Bread slices soaked in custard mixture and coated in flour.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 6 ingredients
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Why it works: Milk and bread are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 11% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 11,466 recipes. Both carry 2-undecenal, which smells sweet. The science ↓

Custard Sippets

Ingredients

Directions

Make the custard

  1. Break the egg into a plate and beat it well.

  2. Add the milk, sugar, and flavoring to the egg and mix.

Prepare and coat the bread

  1. Cut stale bread into slices half an inch thick and shape them neatly.

  2. Soak the bread pieces in the custard mixture without making them too soft.

  3. Remove the soaked bread and place it in a clean cloth with the flour.

  4. Shake the corners of the cloth to coat the bread pieces with flour.

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 + breadtop 11% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together11,466 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-undecenal (sweet).

  2. Egg + breadtop 13% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together22,662 recipes

    Shared aroma: (e)-2-octenal (fatty, green).

  3. Milk + flourtop 14% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together78,219 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  4. Sugar + flourtop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together92,116 recipes

    Shared aroma: phenylacetaldehyde (hawthorne, honey).

  5. Egg + flourtop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together106,462 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

Milk and flour barely smell alike, yet cooks put them together in 78,219 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
Binds the custard and helps set the coating around the bread when cooked.
Milk
Adds moisture and body to the custard so the bread soaks up a liquid base.
Stale bread
Provides the absorbent base that soaks up the custard and holds its shape.
Flour
Dries the soaked bread surface so it holds together during handling and cooking.

The step that matters

Soaking the bread. Soaking too long makes the bread soft and fragile, so it breaks apart when handled. Brief soaking lets the custard coat and partly penetrate the bread while keeping its structure intact.

“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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