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Good Baked Custard
Eight well-beaten eggs, leaving two whites for the top, three pints milk; sweeten and flavor to taste; bake for two hours in a slow oven. Beat the reserved whites to stiff froth with two table-spoons sugar, spread over the top and return to oven to brown.
A plain baked custard scaled for a large household, with a meringue lid borrowed from pie-making. The original leaves sugar and flavouring to the cook, so the numbers below are the ones worth pinning down.
- Slow ovenRead this as 300-325F. Custard sets on protein coagulation, not on browning, and anything above about 325F drives the mixture past setting into curdling and weeping.
- Two hours is for the whole batchThree pints of milk plus eight eggs comes to roughly two quarts of custard, and a deep dish that size genuinely takes 1.5 to 2 hours at 300F. Poured into individual cups it will be done in 35-45 minutes, so judge by the custard rather than the clock.
- Water bathNot called for in the original. In a modern oven set the dish in a roasting pan and pour in boiling water to come halfway up the side, which keeps the outer edge from setting long before the centre.
- Sweeten to tasteThe standard proportion for baked custard is about 1/4 cup sugar per pint of milk, so roughly 3/4 cup here. Flavouring means vanilla, nutmeg, or a strip of lemon peel steeped in the warm milk.
- Scald the milk firstNot stated here, though scalding appears in other period custard recipes. Heating the milk to just below a simmer before whisking it into the eggs shortens the bake and gives a smoother set; add it slowly so the eggs do not scramble.
- DonenessA knife slipped in an inch from the edge comes out clean while the centre still trembles. Carry-over heat finishes the middle; waiting for a clean knife at the centre gives a grainy custard.
- The meringueTwo whites with two tablespoons sugar is a thin covering for a dish this size. Spread it to the very rim so it seals to the edge and does not shrink, and brown at 350-375F for 8-10 minutes rather than under a broiler, which scorches before it sets.
- YieldAbout 10 to 12 servings. Halve everything for a family-sized 1-quart dish and start checking at 50 minutes.
Baked custard was a common sweet of the nineteenth-century American kitchen: eggs, milk and sugar, all of them things a household with a cow and a hen house had on hand, and no crust to make. Buckeye Cookery and Practical Housekeeping, first compiled in Ohio in the 1870s and reissued repeatedly through the following decades, is a contributed-recipe book, and many of its entries read as shorthand between cooks who already knew the method and needed only the proportions. The reserved whites beaten with sugar and browned on top are the same trick applied to lemon and cream pies of the period. The name distinguishes it from boiled custard, the stirred stovetop sauce.