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CUSTARD (a la Reine)
Sweeten, flavour, and boil a breakfast-cupful of thick cream, add a tiny pinch of salt, and stir in the well-beaten yolks of six eggs. Pour the mixture into a jug, and set the jug in a saucepan of cold water. Stir it one way until it thickens. Just before serving flavour it with four table-spoonfuls of maraschino and sweeten it to taste. Time, a quarter of an hour to thicken. Probable cost, 2s., exclusive of the maraschino. Sufficient for a pint and a quarter of custard.
CUSTARD AND SYRUP (a pretty and inexpensive dish for a Children's party). Make some good custard, and mix it with a little isinglass (see CUSTARD MOULD. The custard need not be so rich as the one there given). Oil some small cups of various sizes, fill them with the custard, and when cold and firm turn them out on to a glass dish, putting the large ones in the middle, and the smaller ones round them. Dissolve some red currant, raspberry, or gooseberry jelly with a little wine, or make a small quantity of syrup from sugar and water, flavour it with lemon, and colour it with cochineal. When nearly cold, pour this over and amongst the custards. Lay round the inside of the dish a necklace of ratafias reposing on the outer edge of the syrup. Serve each child with a whole custard, a spoonful of syrup, and a couple of ratafias. Time, twelve hours to stiffen. Probable cost, 2s. 6d. Sufficient for a good-sized dish.
A stirred egg-yolk custard rich enough to stand alone as a sauce or dessert cream, followed by a set version moulded in cups for a children's table. Both hinge on gentle heat and patience rather than technique.
- The measurement to watchA breakfast-cupful is roughly 8-10 fl oz, so figure on about 1 cup of cream. The stated yield of a pint and a quarter is generous even allowing for six yolks; expect closer to a scant pint, or increase the cream to 1 1/4 cups if you need the volume.
- Temperature, not timeThe custard is done at 175-180F, when it coats a spoon and holds a line drawn by a finger. The quarter of an hour given is a rough guide only; on a modern burner it can happen faster, and past 185F the yolks curdle.
- Why the jug goes into cold waterStarting the bain-marie cold means the custard warms with the water rather than hitting hot metal, which is the whole safeguard against scrambling. Keep the water below a simmer throughout and keep stirring in one direction, scraping the bottom.
- Sweeten once, properlyThe recipe tells you to sweeten at the start and again at the end. Sweeten the cream at the beginning with 2-3 tablespoons of sugar and taste after the maraschino goes in, adding more only if needed.
- MaraschinoThis means a clear cherry liqueur of the Luxardo type, distilled from marasca cherries and their kernels, not the sugary red syrup from a jar of cocktail cherries. Four tablespoons of the modern syrup would be cloying; use the liqueur, and add it off the heat so the alcohol and aroma survive.
- IsinglassIsinglass is gelatine rendered from fish swim bladders and is no longer a kitchen staple. Powdered or leaf gelatine does the same job: about 2 to 2 1/2 teaspoons of powder, or three leaves, per pint of custard for something that will unmould yet still be tender.
- Cochineal and ratafiasCochineal is carmine, still sold as a food colour; any red colouring works. Ratafias are small, hard almond macaroons about the size of a coin, closest today to Italian amaretti or ratafia biscuits from the baking aisle.
- Setting and servingTwelve hours means overnight in the refrigerator, not a cool larder. Oil the cups very lightly with a neutral oil and dip the base in warm water for a few seconds to release. The recipe gives no count of children, only 'a good-sized dish', so the number served depends on the size of the cups; the plain custard makes roughly a pint of sauce.
"A la Reine" was one of the most heavily worked phrases in Victorian menu French, attached to anything enriched with cream, yolks or white meat, and here it simply signals that this is the queenly version of a plain boiled custard: no milk, no flour, six yolks to a cup of cream and a spirit flavouring. Maraschino, distilled from marasca cherries and their kernels around Zadar on the Dalmatian coast, was a fashionable confectioner's flavouring in Britain by the early nineteenth century, and the cost of the custard is quoted separately from the liqueur -- the bottle, not the eggs, was the luxury. The second recipe shows the other half of the Victorian kitchen's thinking: the same custard, thinned and stiffened with isinglass, turned out in graduated moulds and floated in coloured syrup to make a centrepiece for a children's party at a cost of half a crown. Careful portioning of one custard, one spoonful of syrup and two ratafias per child was the sort of instruction a Victorian household book could assume its readers wanted.