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Creme D'Orge
Boil gently a cupful of pearl barley in one pint of milk and one pint of water until quite tender. Strain off the liquid (which, if sweetened and flavoured, will be a refreshing and wholesome drink for a child or sick person), and mix with the barley a pint of cream, three table-spoonfuls of sugar, a piece of fresh butter the size of an egg, two eggs well beaten, and a quarter of a nutmeg grated. Return the mixture to the saucepan, and let it simmer gently for an hour. Stir it frequently. It may be either served in custard-glasses, or put into a buttered dish and baked in a moderate oven. If baked, four eggs may be used. Probable cost, 1s. 8d. Sufficient for five or six persons.
A barley custard that doubles as two dishes: the strained cooking liquid is barley water, the drained grain becomes the pudding. The instructions are sound apart from one line that will ruin the eggs.
- The hinge: do not simmer the eggs for an hourOnce the beaten eggs go in, a full hour of direct simmering can curdle the custard into grainy sweet scrambled egg. Cook it over a water bath or on the lowest possible heat, stirring, only until it thickens and coats the spoon — around 175-180F — or take the baked option instead.
- Moderate ovenConventionally taken as around 350F. Setting the buttered dish in a pan of hot water and baking until the centre is just set with a slight wobble, roughly 40-50 minutes for a shallow dish, will give the steadiest result. The recipe's own note to use four eggs when baking is worth following; the extra structure holds up to oven heat.
- Butter the size of an eggAbout 2 oz, or 4 tablespoons. Nineteenth-century books often gave fat by comparison with a familiar object alongside, rather than instead of, weights.
- Pearl barleyModern pearl barley takes 45-60 minutes to go quite tender in the milk-and-water mixture. Stir it now and then and keep the heat low, as the milk catches easily on the bottom of the pan; a cupful will swell to roughly three times its volume.
- A quarter of a nutmegFreshly grated, that is close to a level half-teaspoon — assertive by current taste. Start with a quarter-teaspoon if nutmeg is not meant to dominate.
- The barley waterDo not discard the strained liquid. Sweetened, and flavoured to taste, it is the invalid drink the recipe describes. It will thicken as it cools; thin it with water before serving.
- Cost and yield1s. 8d. was the whole dish, not a portion. Five or six servings in custard glasses; less if baked and served as a pudding.
Crème d'orge is simply "barley cream," and barley held a dual standing in the Victorian household: a cheap bulk grain and, in its strained form, one of the standard sickroom drinks. Barley water was prescribed for fevers, digestive complaints and teething children throughout the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, and the thrift of this recipe — one boiling yielding both a drink for the invalid and a custard for the table — is characteristic of Cassell's approach. Pearl barley, hulled and polished so the grain cooks soft and pale, was the form generally preferred in genteel kitchens by the time this dictionary appeared. Giving the dish a French name was ordinary practice for the period: an English barley pudding was nursery food, while a crème could be sent up in glasses after dinner.