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Dessert

Boiled Custard

A simple custard made by heating milk, adding sugar, eggs, and flavoring, then cooking until set.

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

Ingredients

Directions

Make the custard

  1. Heat the milk in a large pot over boiling water.

  2. Stir sugar into the milk until dissolved.

  3. Slowly add the well-beaten eggs and flavoring once the milk is boiling.

  4. Cook until the mixture is well set.

Cool and serve

  1. Pour into a dish 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.

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. Egg + sugartop 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

Eggs
Set with heat to thicken the milk into a custard that holds its shape.
Milk
Forms the liquid base that the eggs thicken into a creamy custard.
Sugar
Adds sweetness and helps balance the flavor of the custard.

The step that matters

Adding the eggs. Egg proteins set when heated, so beaten eggs can scramble into lumps if they meet hot milk all at once. Adding them slowly while stirring spreads the heat evenly so the custard thickens smoothly.

“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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