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Dessert

Burnt Custard

A custard made with milk, egg yolks, and sugar, baked over a hot iron, served with Savoy cake and raspberry marmalade.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 7 ingredients
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Why it works: Milk and raspberry are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 13% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 1,014 recipes. Both carry delta-decalactone, which smells sweet, creamy. The science ↓

Burnt Custard

Ingredients

Directions

Make the custard

  1. Boil the milk and let it cool.

  2. Mix the cooled milk with the egg yolks and stir over low heat for a few minutes.

  3. Sweeten the mixture to your taste.

Assemble and brown

  1. Place slices of Savoy cake in the bottom of a deep dish and pour the custard over it.

  2. Whip the egg whites until stiff and spread them lightly on top of the custard.

  3. Sprinkle sugar over the egg whites and use a very hot iron to brown the top.

  4. Garnish with raspberry marmalade or any preserved fruit.

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 + raspberrytop 13% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together1,014 recipes

    Shared aroma: delta-decalactone (sweet, creamy).

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

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

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

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

  4. Egg + sugartop 21% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together122,807 recipes

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

  5. Sugar + raspberrytop 21% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together3,101 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2,3-butanedione (butter, sweet).

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

Egg yolks
Thicken the custard and enrich it with fat and emulsifiers as they set over gentle heat.
Egg whites
Whipped to stiff foam, they form a light topping that browns on the surface.
Milk
Forms the liquid base of the custard, which sets as the egg proteins coagulate.
Savoy cake
Soaks up the custard, giving the dish a soft, absorbent base layer.
Sugar
Sweetens the custard and caramelizes on the egg white topping for browning.

The step that matters

Stirring the egg yolk and milk mixture over low heat. Egg yolks set into a thickened custard at moderate temperatures, but higher heat or prolonged cooking can curdle them into lumps. Gentle, constant stirring keeps the custard smooth.

Swap the raspberry

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

  1. Vanillafits better
  2. Figfits better
  3. Raisinfits better
  4. Raspberrythe original

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