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Baked Custards
Boil a pint of cream with some mace and cinnamon, and when it is cold, take four yolks of eggs, a little rose water, sack, nutmeg and sugar, to taste; mix them well and bake them.
A seventeenth-century-style baked custard, written for a cook who already knew that custards are baked gently in a water bath. Everything that matters here is temperature and straining.
- The hinge: bake low, in waterNo oven heat is given because none was expected. Set the filled cups in a pan of hot water and bake at 300-325F until the centres still wobble slightly, roughly 30-40 minutes for small cups. An internal temperature of 170-175F is set; past 180F the yolks curdle and the custard weeps.
- Pint of creamPint size varied: the imperial pint of 20 fl oz dates only from 1824, and an English receipt of this period may well mean a pint nearer the 16 fl oz an American edition intends. Either works with four yolks, which gives a deliberately soft, spoonable set rather than a firm sliceable one.
- Mace and cinnamonWhole spice, not ground: a blade or two of mace and a piece of cinnamon stick, infused in the hot cream and then removed. Ground spice will leave the finished custard gritty and muddy-coloured.
- SackSack was a fortified white wine from Spain or the Canaries. Dry or medium sherry is the closest thing on a modern shelf; a tablespoon or two is enough, as too much alcohol slackens the set.
- Rose waterRose waters vary widely in strength, and modern commercial ones can be very concentrated. Start with half a teaspoon per pint and taste the cold cream before adding more.
- Sugar to tasteFor a dessert custard, 3 to 4 tablespoons per pint is a reasonable starting point. The recipe adds it to the cold cream with the yolks; whisk until no grit remains, or dissolve it in the cream while it is still warm.
- Cooling then mixingThe cream is cooled before the yolks go in precisely so it does not scramble them. If you are impatient, temper instead: whisk a little warm cream into the yolks, then return it all. Strain the finished mixture before filling the cups.
- YieldAbout four 5-oz custard cups. Serve barely warm or chilled.
Baked custard of this kind is a long-established English sweet, and the flavourings here date it more precisely than any of the measurements do. Rose water and sack were standard aromatics for creams and custards in seventeenth- and eighteenth-century English receipt books, in an era when vanilla was still an expensive rarity and mace was a common household spice rather than a curiosity. Sack, the wine of Spain and the Canaries familiar from Shakespeare, appears as a flavouring for possets, syllabubs and creams. Collections billed as "genuine receipts" often reprinted such formulas from older manuscript books, which is why the instructions assume so much: "bake them" would have been understood as small pots standing in a dish of water, in the falling heat of an oven after the bread had come out.