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Boiled Cornflour Custard

A custard made from cornflour, milk, sugar, and egg, boiled and cooled.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 4 ingredients
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Why it works: Milk and egg are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 18% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 88,785 recipes. Both carry 2-nonenal, which smells fatty, green. The science ↓

Boiled Cornflour Custard

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare

  1. Mix the cornflour with a little cold milk to form a smooth paste.

  2. In a clean saucepan, bring the rest of the milk to a boil.

Make the custard

  1. Stir in the cornflour paste and add the sugar.

  2. Boil for a few minutes.

  3. Beat the egg in a bowl.

  4. Gradually pour in the hot cornflour mixture while stirring continuously.

Cool

  1. Let it cool.

  2. Stir occasionally to prevent a skin from forming.

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 + eggtop 18% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together88,785 recipes

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

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

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

  3. Sugar + eggtop 21% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together122,807 recipes

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

Milk and sugar barely smell alike, yet cooks put them together in 77,875 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

Cornflour
Starch swells and thickens the liquid as it heats, giving the custard its body.
Milk
Forms the liquid base that the starch thickens and that carries the flavour.
Egg
Adds richness and body, as its proteins set slightly with heat.
Lump sugar
Adds sweetness and balances the mild, starchy flavour of the custard.

The step that matters

Stir in the cornflour paste and keep stirring as it boils. Cornflour only thickens fully once the mixture reaches a boil and the starch granules swell. Stirring while it heats spreads the paste evenly, which prevents lumps and scorching on the base of the pan.

“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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