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Guava Custard
To the yolks of three whipped eggs add three cups guava pulp, one pint of milk, a little orange peel, two teaspoons cornstarch, a pinch of salt, and sugar to taste. Bake in cups or pastry shells, in pudding-dish unlined or cook in double-boiler with care (as with all custards) and pour into heated glass dish.
A soft custard built on guava pulp, offered three ways: baked in cups or a pastry shell, baked in a dish, or stirred over water and poured out to set. A few points make the difference between a set custard and a curdled one.
- Acid is the hingeGuava is markedly acidic, and acid plus heat plus milk curdles readily. Warm the milk, temper it into the yolks, and stir the guava pulp in last off the heat rather than boiling the two together. The cornstarch will help guard against exactly this, though the recipe does not say why it is there.
- Guava pulpThree cups means sieved pulp, not chopped fruit — guava seeds are hard as gravel and must be pressed out through a sieve or food mill. Roughly 2 to 2 1/2 lb of ripe guavas gives three cups. Canned guava pulp or shells work, but shells come packed in syrup and some pulps are sweetened, so check the tin and cut the added sugar accordingly.
- A pint of milkTwo cups. Whole milk gives a thin custard alongside only three yolks; half milk and half cream makes a firmer set, which matters if you intend to unmould it or fill pastry.
- Orange peel"A little orange peel" means the zest, pared in strips and steeped in the hot milk, then lifted out. Modern citrus is often waxed, so scrub it first. About the zest of half an orange is enough not to bully the guava.
- Oven temperatureBaked custards want 325F, set in a pan of hot water reaching halfway up the cups. Expect 30 to 40 minutes for individual cups, closer to an hour for a single dish. Pull them when the centre still trembles.
- The stovetop version"With care" is doing a lot of work. Over barely simmering water, stir constantly until the custard coats a spoon and reads 175F; the cornstarch lets it go a little hotter than a plain custard would tolerate, but not to a boil.
- Pastry shellsIf filling pastry, blind-bake the shell first and brush it with egg white — this custard is wet enough to soak an unbaked crust into paste.
- YieldThe mixture comes to something over five cups, so eight to ten small servings. Serve cold; the three leftover whites will make a meringue for the top if you want one.
Guava reached print in American and British cookery mostly as jelly and "guava cheese" — the fruit is high in pectin and sets almost aggressively — so a custard is the less common use, treating an imported tropical fruit exactly as one would treat a domestic apple or peach. The name comes through Spanish guayaba from an Arawakan word of the Caribbean, one of the small group of fruit names that entered European languages directly from the Americas.