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Custard, Common
Put a pint of milk into a clean saucepan, with a piece of thin lemon-rind or half an inch of stick cinnamon. Let it simmer gently for a quarter of an hour, till it is pleasantly flavoured. Mix a tea-spoonful of arrowroot, ground rice, or flour very smoothly with three table-spoonfuls of cold milk. Add the yolk of an egg well beaten, and strain the hot milk upon the mixture. Place it on the fire for a few minutes to thicken, stirring it all the time. A dessert-spoonful of brandy is an improvement. Probable cost, 4d. Sufficient for a pint of custard.
A thrifty pouring custard: one yolk to a pint of milk, with starch doing the work eggs would otherwise do. The whole thing takes about twenty minutes, most of it infusing.
- The pintAn imperial pint is 20 fl oz, so use 2½ cups of milk. The recipe does not say whether the three tablespoons of cold milk for slaking the starch come out of that pint or are additional to it; either will work.
- Choose your thickener knowinglyArrowroot sets clear and glossy but breaks down if held at a boil, so pull it off the heat as soon as it coats the spoon. Flour and ground rice need a full minute at a bare simmer to cook out their raw taste, and will look opaque rather than glassy.
- The hinge: temper, then thicken gentlyStraining the hot milk onto the yolk-and-starch slurry is the tempering step, and it is why this works. Return it to a low heat and stir constantly; the starch gives some insurance against curdling, but a hard boil will still scramble the yolk into specks.
- Lemon rind means zest onlyPare the rind in thin strips with no white pith attached, or fifteen minutes of simmering will turn the custard bitter. Strain the rind or cinnamon out with the milk, as the recipe assumes.
- Watch the reductionA quarter of an hour of gentle simmering will lose you a little milk to evaporation. Keep the heat genuinely low and the pan partly covered, or top up with a splash of milk before thickening.
- ConsistencyThis is a thin pouring custard, closer to modern crème anglaise than to a set custard. It will not hold a shape, and it thickens noticeably as it cools.
- Yield and servingA pint serves four to six as a sauce over stewed fruit, a baked pudding, or pie. Serve warm, or cover the surface directly with plastic wrap while cooling to stop a skin forming.
- Probable cost, 4dThe price is in pre-decimal pence and reflects Victorian retail prices; it is there so a cook could cost a dish, not as any guide today.
Cassell's separates its "common" custards from its rich ones by arithmetic: richer boiled custards run to several yolks a pint, while this one makes a single yolk stretch by borrowing body from arrowroot, ground rice, or flour. Starch-thickened economy custards were widespread in nineteenth-century British household cookery, and it is the same logic that produced commercial custard powder — a starch-and-colouring blend, generally traced to Birmingham in the late 1830s, sold precisely to those who could not spare the eggs. Flavouring milk by infusion rather than by extract also suits the period: lemon peel and stick cinnamon were common flavourings in English kitchens before bottled vanilla became cheap, and the spoonful of brandy recalls the wine-enriched custards and possets of the eighteenth-century table.