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Dessert

Custard Pudding

A sweet custard made with flour, milk, egg yolks, sugar, nutmeg, lemon peel, and folded egg whites, boiled until set.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 7 ingredients
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Custard Pudding

Why it works: Nutmeg and lemon match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 5% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 11,318 recipes. Both carry beta-phellandrene, which smells minty, terpene. The science ↓

Custard Pudding

Ingredients

Directions

Make the custard

  1. In a bowl, combine the flour and milk.

  2. Add the egg yolks and flavor with sugar, nutmeg, or lemon peel as desired.

Cook and serve

  1. Beat the egg whites until frothy and fold them into the mixture.

  2. Pour the mixture into a pot and boil for more than half an hour.

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. Nutmeg + lemontop 5% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together11,318 recipes

    Shared aroma: beta-phellandrene (minty, terpene).

  2. Flour + nutmegtop 8% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together18,623 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. Milk + lemontop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together19,053 recipes

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

Flour and milk 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

Flour
Starch that thickens the milk and helps the custard hold its shape.
Milk
The main liquid, which the eggs and flour set into a soft custard.
Egg yolks
Proteins that thicken as they heat and add richness.
Egg whites
Beaten air that lightens the texture of the set custard.
Sugar
Adds sweetness to the custard.

The step that matters

Boiling the mixture. Egg proteins thicken as they heat and can curdle or turn grainy if overcooked. A long boil with egg yolks and whites in the mixture risks a lumpy custard, so the mixture needs steady attention while it cooks.

Swap the lemon

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

  1. Raisinfits better
  2. Vanillafits better
  3. Figfits about as well
  4. Lemonthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against flour, milk, egg, sugar, nutmeg. 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.

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