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Raspberry Custard
Bruise lightly some freshly-gathered ripe raspberries, sprinkle a little sugar over them, and heat them gently to draw out the juice. Pour the juice off, and with a pint of it mix very gradually the well-beaten yolks of three eggs. Stir the custard over a gentle fire for a few minutes, pour it out, and when it is cool mix with it a table-spoonful of strained lemon-juice and a quarter of a pint of thick cream. Serve in glasses. Time, six or seven minutes to heat the custard. Probable cost, 2s. per pint. Sufficient for four or five glassfuls.
A fruit custard with no milk in it: raspberry juice is thickened with egg yolks alone, then loosened with cream and sharpened with lemon. The whole thing hinges on keeping the pan below a simmer.
- Fruit neededA pint of raspberry juice is a great deal of fruit. Cassell's pint is imperial (20 fl oz), and on a rough reckoning you may need 3 lb or more of ripe raspberries to reach it, more again if the fruit is dry or underripe, or if you take only the free-run juice as the recipe directs. Heating them gently with sugar and pressing through a sieve gives a better return.
- Old measuresA quarter of a pint of cream is 5 fl oz imperial, about 140 ml, or a little under two-thirds of a US cup. "Thick cream" means unwhipped heavy or double cream, not a whipped or soured product.
- Temperature is everythingYolks set from about 150F and scramble by roughly 185F. Take the custard to 170-175F on a thermometer and no further; the recipe's "gentle fire" was a cook's way of saying the same thing without one. A bain-marie is more forgiving than direct heat.
- Temper the yolks"Mix very gradually" is the instruction that saves the dish. Whisk a ladleful of the warm juice into the beaten yolks first, then return the mixture to the rest of the juice, or the hot acidic liquid will set the yolks in threads.
- Acid thins the setAcid -- Raspberry juice is acidic and the lemon juice adds more, so this is unlikely to set as firmly as a milk custard. The original directs that the lemon and cream go in only once the custard is cool.
- Strain and chillStrain -- Pass the cooked custard through a fine sieve as you pour it out; this catches any strands of set yolk. Chilling before serving will help it thicken, though the original does not call for it.
- Timing"Six or seven minutes" assumes the steady low heat of a range fire. On a modern burner, judge by thickness and thermometer rather than the clock: the custard is done when it coats the back of a spoon and holds a line drawn by a finger.
- YieldFour or five small glasses, as stated. In modern ramekins or tumblers, count on four servings.
The dish demonstrates a point of technique: that egg yolks will thicken almost any liquid, fruit juice included, provided the heat stays below the point at which they coagulate hard. Custards built on wine, cider or fruit juice instead of milk were a familiar feature of English cookery from the eighteenth century onward, close relatives of the syllabubs and possets that preceded them, and they suited a household with a fruit garden and a dairy but no reliable ice. The note on cost is a reminder of how these dictionaries were used: 2s. a pint was real money in the 1870s, which marks raspberry custard as a summer luxury made in the short weeks when the canes were bearing and the fruit could be had "freshly-gathered" rather than bought.