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Custard Without Eggs
Mix one large table-spoonful of ground rice or cornflour with a little cold milk Flavour a pint of milk with any flavouring that may be preferred, sweeten it, and pour it boiling over the rice, stirring it all the time to prevent its getting into lumps. Return it to the saucepan, and boil it two or three minutes. When cold, it may be used instead of custard for fruit tarts or stewed fruit. Time, three minutes to boil. Probable cost, 3d. Sufficient for one pint.
A cornflour-thickened milk sauce standing in for egg custard — cheap, quick, and reliable if you get the slurry right.
- Cornflour means cornstarchBritish "cornflour" is the fine white starch sold as cornstarch in the US, not cornmeal or corn flour. Ground rice is a coarser rice flour and gives a slightly grainier, more opaque sauce.
- QuantitiesOne large tablespoon of starch to a pint (20 fl oz / 570 ml) of milk gives a pouring sauce, not a set custard. For a thicker sauce that holds its shape on a spoon, use two tablespoons.
- The hinge: slake the starch coldMix the starch to a smooth thin cream with two or three tablespoons of cold milk before the hot milk goes anywhere near it. Starch dropped dry into hot liquid seizes instantly into lumps that no amount of stirring will disperse.
- Boil it, and mean itCornflour needs to reach a full boil for a minute or two to lose its raw, chalky taste and to reach full thickening power. Stir constantly at the bottom and corners of the pan — it scorches easily and the burnt flavour carries.
- Sweetening and flavouringAbout 1 to 2 tablespoons of sugar per pint suits most fruit. Infuse the milk while heating with a vanilla pod, a strip of lemon zest, a bay leaf or a blade of cinnamon, then strain before combining; ground spices can go in with the starch.
- Skin and storagePress a disc of parchment or cling film onto the surface as it cools if you dislike a skin. It thickens considerably when cold — loosen with a splash of milk and a whisk before pouring. Keeps three days refrigerated.
- YieldOne pint serves four to six as a sauce over tart or stewed fruit.
- Cost"3d." is threepence in pre-decimal currency, and the low figure fits a recipe whose stated selling point is doing without eggs.
Egg-free "custards" appear throughout nineteenth-century English cookery books because eggs were seasonal and often dear, while cornflour was cheap and kept indefinitely in the store cupboard. Refined maize starch was commercialised in the mid-nineteenth century and marketed hard to British households as a versatile thickener; brands such as Brown & Polson's became fixtures of the Victorian pantry, and the familiar yellow custard powder — Alfred Bird's, dating from the late 1830s but not sold to the public in any quantity until the 1840s — is essentially this recipe with colouring and flavouring added. Cassell's treats the dish as a technique to be learned — the starch slurry — and its presence signals a book written for cooks who had to make a good showing on a small budget.