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Custard Souffle

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

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 6 ingredients
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Why it works: Milk and butter 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

Make the custard base

  1. Bring the milk to a boil.

  2. In a bowl, beat together the flour and butter, then add to the boiling milk.

  3. Boil for 8 minutes, stirring often.

  4. In another bowl, beat the sugar, salt, and egg yolks together, then add to the milk mixture and let it cool.

Bake and serve

  1. Once cool, fold in the stiffly beaten egg whites.

  2. Pour the mixture into a buttered dish and bake for 30 minutes.

  3. 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. Milk + buttertop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together81,283 recipes

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

  2. Flour + buttertop 12% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together124,287 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  3. Milk + flourtop 14% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together78,219 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  4. Sugar + flourtop 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).

Flour and butter 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 trap air for lift, and yolks enrich the custard and help it set.
Flour
Thickens the milk into a stable base that holds the folded egg whites.
Milk
Forms the liquid base of the custard, giving body and moisture.
Butter
Adds fat for richness and softness in the base.
Sugar
Adds sweetness and balances the savory-leaning custard base.

The step that matters

Folding in the egg whites. Stiffly beaten whites hold the air that makes the souffle rise. Folding gently keeps that air in; stirring or beating deflates it, and the souffle bakes flat and dense. The base should also be cool, since hot base would collapse the foam.

“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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