Skip to main content
Dessert

Plain Custard

A simple custard made by sweetening milk with sugar, boiling with cinnamon and lime peel, then cooling before serving.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 4 ingredients
Jump to recipe ↓
Plain Custard

Why it works: Cinnamon and lime match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 5% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 470 recipes. Both carry beta-phellandrene, which smells minty, terpene. The science ↓

Plain Custard

Ingredients

Directions

  1. Sweeten the milk with pounded sugar.

  2. Boil the milk with cinnamon and lime peel.

  3. Remove from heat and let cool before serving.

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.

Photo for illustrative purposes only · Contact us to use it

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. Cinnamon + limetop 5% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together470 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. Sugar + cinnamontop 10% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together30,779 recipes

    Shared aroma: guaiacol (smoky, sweet).

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

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

  5. Milk + limetop 27% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together700 recipes

    Shared aroma: decanal (soap, orange peel).

Sugar and cinnamon 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 body of the custard and provides the liquid base that carries the sweetness and flavour.
Pounded sugar
Sweetens the milk to taste.
Cinnamon
Adds warm aroma to the milk as it boils.

Swap the lime

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

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

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

Cinnamon RollsCinnamon Rolls71 recipesCinnamon CakeCinnamon Cake42 recipesWhite CakeWhite Cake431 recipesPound CakePound Cake373 recipes