Skip to main content
Dessert

Custard Souffle

A baked custard souffle made with butter, flour, sugar, milk, and eggs.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 5 ingredients
Jump to recipe ↓

Why it works: Butter and milk are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 7% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 81,283 recipes. Both carry (z)-4-heptenal, which smells biscuit, cream. The science ↓

Custard Souffle

Ingredients

Directions

The book gives no oven temperature. The 350°F (175°C) in the steps was added when the recipe was transcribed, as a starting point.

Make the custard

  1. In a saucepan, bring the milk to a boil.

  2. In a bowl, beat together the flour and butter, then add to the boiling milk and cover for 8 minutes, stirring often.

  3. In another bowl, beat the sugar and egg yolks together, then mix in the cooled milk mixture.

Fold and bake

  1. Once cooled, gently fold in the egg whites beaten to stiff peaks.

  2. Pour the mixture into a buttered dish and bake at 350°F (175°C) for 30 minutes.

Serve

  1. Serve immediately with sauce.

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. Butter + milktop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together81,283 recipes

    Shared aroma: (z)-4-heptenal (biscuit, cream).

  2. Butter + flourtop 12% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together124,287 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  3. Flour + milktop 14% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together78,219 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  4. Flour + sugartop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together92,116 recipes

    Shared aroma: phenylacetaldehyde (hawthorne, honey).

  5. Flour + eggtop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together106,462 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

Butter and flour barely smell alike, yet cooks put them together in 124,287 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

Eggs
Whipped whites give the soufflé its lift, while yolks enrich and set the custard.
Flour
Thickens the hot milk into a stable base that holds the soufflé together.
Milk
Forms the liquid base of the custard, which is thickened and then lightened.
Butter
Adds fat and richness, and combines with the flour to help thicken the base.
Sugar
Adds sweetness and balances the savory-tasting custard base.

The step that matters

Gently fold in the egg whites. Whipped whites trap air that makes the soufflé rise. Stirring or folding roughly deflates the foam, so the soufflé bakes flat and dense. Fold only until just combined.

“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

White CakeWhite Cake431 recipesPound CakePound Cake373 recipesOrange Bundt CakeOrange Bundt Cake349 recipesSpice CakeSpice Cake344 recipes