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Savoury Custard for Invalids
Mix a dessert-spoonful of cornflour to a smooth paste with a little cold beef-tea, and then add gradually as much more beef-tea as will make the quantity up to half a pint. Stir the preparation over the fire till it begins to thicken, pour it out, and serve. If preferred, this custard may be made with any good broth instead of beef-tea. Time, five or six minutes to stir the custard over the fire.
A thin, spoonable broth thickened with cornstarch, intended as sickroom food. It comes together in minutes, and the only real skill is stopping before it turns to paste.
- Cornflour is cornstarchBritish cornflour is what American cooks call cornstarch, not finely milled corn flour or cornmeal. Substituting either of the latter gives a gritty, gluey result.
- Dessert-spoonfulA dessertspoon sits between a teaspoon and a tablespoon: roughly 2 teaspoons, about 10 ml. That is a light thickening for 10 fl oz of liquid, which is the point — it should coat a spoon, not stand up.
- Half a pintAn imperial half-pint is 10 fl oz, or about 1¼ US cups. This makes one invalid's portion, served in a cup or small bowl.
- Beef teaStrong beef broth made by long, gentle steeping of lean beef in water, strained and skimmed of all fat. A good low-sodium beef stock or a homemade consommé stands in; bouillon cubes and concentrated pastes are far saltier than Victorian beef tea and will overwhelm the dish.
- The hinge: slurry first, then diluteThe cold-liquid paste is not optional. Cornstarch dropped into warm broth seizes into lumps that no amount of stirring will disperse.
- Do not overcookCornstarch reaches full thickness within a minute of the first bubbles and then begins to thin again if held over heat. Five or six minutes covers the whole warming and stirring; pull it as soon as it coats the spoon.
- It is not a custardThere is no egg here — the name refers only to the soft, set texture. Nothing needs to be tempered, and it will not curdle.
- ServingServe at once. A skin forms as it cools and the mixture stiffens noticeably; it does not reheat gracefully. The recipe calls for no seasoning of its own, so any salt should be added cautiously and tasted for.
Beef tea was the central medicine-food of the nineteenth-century sickroom, prescribed for fever, convalescence and anything else that left a patient unable to chew. Cassell's, like Mrs Beeton and the nursing manuals of the period, devotes real space to invalid cookery because a household was expected to nurse its own sick at home, and the diet books of the day held that meat juices carried nourishment in a form the weakest stomach could absorb ing,, since beef tea is mostly water, salts and gelatine with very little protein. It is thickened with cornflour, said to have been marketed widely to British households from around the mid-century. The word "custard" here appears to describe only the soft set, rather than any egg content.