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Queen's Custard
Sweeten a pint of thick cream with two table-spoonfuls of pounded sugar. Boil it, allow it to cool slightly, then mix with it very gradually the well-beaten yolks of eight eggs. Put the custard into a heated jug, place this in a pan with boiling water, and stir with a wooden spoon till it begins to thicken. Pour it out, mix with it a wine-glassful of maraschino or noyeau, and continue stirring until it is cold. An ounce of almonds, blanched and thinly sliced, may be added or not. The custard is to be stirred over the fire till it begins to thicken. Sufficient for a pint and a half of custard. Probable cost, 3s.
A rich stirred custard in the old style — eight yolks to a pint of cream, thickened over water rather than direct heat, and spiked with a nut-kernel liqueur. The whole thing hinges on temperature control.
- The hinge: keep it below a simmerEgg yolk proteins set between about 160F and 180F; cream and sugar buy you a little margin, but past roughly 185F the custard curdles and no amount of stirring brings it back. The jug-in-boiling-water arrangement is a bain-marie doing exactly this job — keep the water at a bare tremble, not a rolling boil, and pull the custard the moment it coats the spoon.
- Imperial measuresAn imperial pint is 20 fl oz, so this is about 2½ US cups of cream. The finished yield of "a pint and a half" is 30 fl oz imperial, near enough 3½ US cups \,, since it is very rich.
- A wine-glassfulA wine-glassful — In Victorian cookery books this is conventionally taken as about 2 fl oz, roughly a quarter cup. The recipe adds it off the heat, after the custard has thickened.
- Noyeau and maraschinoNoyau (noyeau) is a liqueur flavoured with peach or apricot kernels; maraschino is distilled from marasca cherries, stones included. Both carry the same faintly bitter-almond note, which is the point of the flavouring. Modern commercial bottlings are produced with the kernel compounds controlled — use a bought bottle, not a home infusion of stones or bitter almonds.
- Pounded sugarCaster sugar. Two tablespoons for a pint of cream is restrained by modern dessert standards; taste and adjust before the yolks go in, since sugar also raises the curdling point slightly.
- Tempering the eggsTempering the eggs — "Mix very gradually" is the whole instruction: the cream is boiled, allowed to cool slightly, and the beaten yolks then worked into it a little at a time, so that no part of the egg meets the full heat at once.
- The heated jugA warmed heatproof jug or bowl standing in the pan. A stainless or glass bowl over simmering water does the same work; avoid thin aluminium, which reacts with egg and can grey the custard.
- Stirring until coldNot fussiness. Continuous stirring during cooling stops a skin forming and keeps the texture even; pressing cling film to the surface achieves the same end with less effort.
- Probable costThree shillings was a substantial outlay in the 1870s — this was a dish for a dinner party, not a nursery pudding.
This belongs to the general run of "boiled" or stirred custards, distinguished from the plainer sort by cream instead of milk, yolks alone instead of whole eggs, and a spirit added off the heat. The regal name looks decorative rather than documentary: names such as "Queen's", "Royal" and "Duchess" appear on a good many rich or costly Victorian dishes, and Cassell's probable-cost line indicates which category this falls into. The liqueurs are the period marker: maraschino from Zara on the Dalmatian coast and noyau, generally traced to French kernel infusions, were both fashionable dessert flavourings in nineteenth-century England, valued for the bitter-almond note that pairs with cream. A cold stirred custard of this sort keeps company with syllabubs and creams — cold sweets that could be made ahead and stood by until dinner.