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CUSTARD, BOILED (cheap)
Simmer three pints of milk for half an hour in a well-lined saucepan, with lemon or cinnamon to flavour the liquid. Strain it and add a table-spoonful of ground rice or arrowroot smoothly mixed in half a wine-glassful of cold milk. Beat up the yolks of three eggs and add them, with three ounces of sugar, to the rest. Stir the custard gently and steadily till it thickens, but do not boil it or it will curdle. This is a good custard for puddings. Probable cost, 11d. If served in cups, sufficient for twelve.
A thrifty pouring custard stretched with starch so that three eggs can set three pints of milk. The starch is doing most of the work, which is what makes it forgiving.
- The quantities in modern termsThree imperial pints is 60 imperial fl oz, about 1.7 litres, or roughly 7 US cups. A wine-glassful is conventionally reckoned at about 2 fl oz, so "half a wine-glassful" is about 2 tablespoons of cold milk for slaking the starch. Three ounces of sugar is a scant half cup.
- The hingeEgg yolks curdle from about 180F/82C, and the recipe's warning not to boil is the whole technique. Keep the pan below a simmer once the yolks are in and pull it off the heat as soon as it coats a spoon; the ground rice or arrowroot raises the tolerance a little but will not save a boiled custard.
- A well-lined saucepanA pan with an intact tin lining, so the milk never touches bare copper or iron. Any heavy stainless or enamelled pan does the job; avoid unlined aluminium, which can grey a milk-and-egg mixture.
- Lemon or cinnamonPared zest in wide strips, or a broken stick of cinnamon — not juice, which will curdle the milk, and not ground cinnamon, which cannot be strained out. Half an hour at a bare simmer both infuses and reduces the milk slightly, concentrating it.
- Ground rice and arrowroot are not interchangeableGround rice is a coarse rice flour and gives a slightly grainy, opaque body; arrowroot sets clear and thins if held hot too long. Cornstarch can stand in for either, though not necessarily spoon for spoon, and needs a moment of near-boiling before the yolks go in to lose its raw taste.
- Temper the yolksThe recipe adds beaten yolks straight to hot milk. Whisk a ladleful of the hot milk into the yolks first, then return the lot to the pan — the same result with much less risk of scrambled threads.
- Strain twiceOnce after the infusion to remove the peel or cinnamon, and again through a fine sieve after thickening. The second straining is what separates a smooth custard from a passable one.
- Yield and useTwelve cups as served, or a generous quantity of pouring sauce for puddings. It thickens further as it cools; cover the surface with film if you dislike a skin.
Cassell's flags this one as cheap for a reason: a rich boiled custard of the period used far more yolks in proportion to its milk, while this uses three yolks to three pints and makes up the difference with a spoonful of starch. The stated cost of 11d for twelve servings placed it within reach of a modest household, and the book's habit of pricing recipes reflects a readership of cooks working to a weekly housekeeping allowance rather than a menu. Ground rice and arrowroot were both standard store-cupboard thickeners in late Victorian Britain rom from the West Indies and marketed as an invalid food — and their use here is straightforwardly economic, since starch is cheaper than eggs. The instruction not to boil is among the most frequently repeated rules in the custard literature, appearing in English cookery books long before anyone could explain why egg proteins coagulate at the temperature they do.