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Caramel Custard
4 eggs and 1 yolk, 1/2 cup sugar, 1 pint milk, and 1 teaspoon lemon extract. Have plain tin pudding mold, put 3 tablespoons sugar into small saucepan and stir till it becomes quite brown like coffee. Pour this into mold and run it all over bottom of it. Crisco then sides of mold, beat eggs and sugar together till mixed well, then add milk and flavoring. Pour all into prepared mold, cover with piece of Criscoed paper; have stewpan with an inch of boiling water in it; put saucer or something flat in bottom of it, set pudding tin on this, and cover pan with lid. Let steam slowly for at least 1 hour. It must not boil, but be set on part of stove where it will keep hot without boiling. Turn out and serve hot or cold.
A steamed caramel custard — crème caramel made on the stovetop rather than in the oven. The whole recipe turns on holding the water below a simmer.
- The hinge: never let it boilCustard sets at about 175-180F; water boils at 212F. If the water in the stewpan comes to a rolling boil the eggs curdle and the custard weeps. Keep the water at a bare tremble, or set the whole thing in a 325F oven in a water bath for about an hour instead, which is easier to control.
- CriscoCrisco is hydrogenated vegetable shortening, and this book was published by Procter & Gamble to promote it — hence its appearance where an older cookbook would say butter. Any neutral fat or a thin film of butter works for greasing the mold and the covering paper.
- The moldA "plain tin pudding mold" is a smooth-sided metal mold with no fluting, so the custard releases cleanly. This quantity suits a mold of roughly a quart: a metal or ceramic charlotte mold, or four to six ramekins, will do; ramekins need only about 30-35 minutes.
- CaramelThree tablespoons of dry sugar melted alone scorches quickly. Use a heavy pan, add a teaspoon of water to help it melt evenly, and pull it off the heat the moment it is the color of strong coffee — it keeps darkening in the hot pan. Pour and tilt fast; it stiffens in seconds.
- Eggs and sugarBeat only until combined. Whipping air into the mixture gives a foamy, pitted custard rather than a smooth one. Straining the mixture into the mold catches any stringy white and the chalazae.
- Lemon extractA teaspoon of extract is assertive by modern standards. Half a teaspoon, or the zest of one lemon steeped in the warmed milk and strained out, gives a cleaner flavor.
- Testing and unmoldingIt is done when a knife inserted an inch from the edge comes out clean and the center still wobbles slightly. Cool at least 20 minutes before turning out hot, or chill several hours for a cold custard — chilled, the caramel dissolves into a thin sauce.
- YieldA pint of milk and five eggs' worth of egg gives four to six servings.
A Calendar of Dinners belongs to a genre of early twentieth-century cookbooks issued by manufacturers: Procter & Gamble published it to put Crisco, introduced in 1911, into American kitchens by way of a year's worth of menus, which is why shortening appears in places a household manual would have said butter or lard. The dish itself is much older than the book — a caramel-lined baked custard appears in French cookery as cr"me renvers"e and in Spanish and Latin American kitchens as flan, and English cooks knew it as burnt-sugar or caramel custard in the nineteenth century. Steaming it over water on top of the stove, rather than baking it, may reflect a period when many households cooked on a coal or wood range whose oven heat was hard to hold steady; a covered pan on a cooler part of the stovetop would have been a more reliable route to a gentle, even set.