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Dutch Custard
Break six eggs into a basin, add three ounces of fine sugar, and whisk thoroughly. Line a pie-dish with puff paste, or if preferred, only put a border round the edge. Mix a pint and a half of freshly-picked raspberries with three ounces of sugar, add it to the eggs, and pour the mixture into the pie-dish. Bake in a moderate oven. Time, thirty to thirty-five minutes. Probable cost, 1s. 9d. Sufficient for four or five persons.
An egg-and-fruit custard with no milk or cream in it at all, which is the thing to understand before you start. Everything else follows from that.
- Moderate ovenUsually read as somewhere around 350F (175C). Much hotter and the eggs are liable to curdle around the fruit before the pastry has coloured.
- A pint and a half of raspberriesMeasured by volume, not weight: on the imperial pint that is roughly 3.5 cups, somewhere in the region of a pound of fruit. Either way it is a generous amount of very wet berries for six eggs, so expect a soft, spoonable set rather than a sliceable tart.
- No milk means no safety netDairy custards are forgiving because the milk dilutes the egg proteins. This one is essentially sweetened whole egg thinned by raspberry juice, so it sets faster and tightens sooner. Pull it when the centre still wobbles as a single mass.
- Puff pasteReady-rolled all-butter puff is a fair substitute. Because the filling is loose and acidic, blind-bake the lined dish for about 15 minutes at 400F with beans, then drop the oven to 350F before filling; the border-only version the recipe offers avoids the sogginess problem altogether.
- Fine sugarCaster sugar. Six ounces total (about 170 g) split between the eggs and the fruit, which is modest by Victorian standards and about right for sharp raspberries.
- Timing and donenessThirty to thirty-five minutes is realistic in a shallow pie-dish. A knife slid in an inch from the edge should come out clean while the middle is still slightly fluid; carryover heat finishes it.
- Probable cost1s 9d is the price in pre-decimal British currency, about 21 old pence. Cassell's quoted costs throughout as a guide for household accounts; they are useless as prices and useful as a record of what a dish signalled in terms of expense.
- Yield and servingFour or five, as stated; the recipe gives no dish size. Serve barely warm or at room temperature rather than straight from the oven.
"Dutch" attached to a great many nineteenth-century English dishes without much geographical warrant, sometimes meaning Netherlandish, sometimes German (from Deutsch). What is genuinely interesting here is the definition of custard: to a Victorian cook the word meant a mixture set by egg, not necessarily one enriched with milk, and fruit custards of exactly this kind take their liquid from the berries. Cassell's Dictionary of Cookery, compiled in the 1870s for an expanding middle-class readership, filed such recipes alphabetically alongside hundreds of variations on the same idea, with the costings appended so a housekeeper could judge a dish before committing the eggs to it. The insistence on "freshly-picked" raspberries is the tell: this is a recipe for a household with a garden or a good market, made in the few weeks of the year when the fruit was there.