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Baked Custard
One egg beaten light, a scant pint of milk, two teaspoons of sugar. Pour in a small buttered pan, grate nutmeg over the top, set in a larger pan of boiling water, and bake in a moderate oven.
Watch it or it will cook too much.
Insert a knife blade and if it comes out clean the custard is done. Serve ice cold.
A deliberately lean custard from the invalid-cookery chapter, where the aim was digestibility rather than richness. The proportions are unusual by modern dessert standards and worth understanding before you commit the milk.
- The egg-to-milk ratioOne egg to a scant pint (just under 2 cups) of milk is about half the egg a modern baked custard uses, which is normally one egg per cup of milk. It will set, but only just: expect something between a soft junket and a spoon custard.
- "Scant pint"A pint here is 16 fl oz; scant means a little under, so measure about 15 oz. With so little egg, an extra splash of milk is the difference between a set custard and a sweet soup.
- Oven heatA moderate oven is 350°F, and the editor's note above confirms it. Many cooks now drop baked custards to 325°F for a smoother set, since the water bath buys you time but not immunity from curdling.
- The water bath is the whole techniqueUse boiling water, not hot tap water, and bring it at least halfway up the sides of the inner pan. The bath cannot rise much above 212F, which caps the heat reaching the custard so the egg proteins coagulate gently; without it the edges scramble long before the centre thickens.
- DonenessThe knife test works, but the reliable measure is temperature: the centre should read 170–175°F. A slight wobble at the middle is correct, as carryover heat finishes the set out of the oven.
- SugarTwo teaspoons for a pint is barely sweet. For the table you would want more, on the order of 2-3 tablespoons.
- NutmegGrate it fresh over the surface just before baking so it forms a speckled skin. Pre-ground nutmeg gives a duller, dustier flavour.
- Yield and servingAbout two small servings. "Serve ice cold" means thoroughly chilled; a warm baked custard of this thinness reads as raw milk.
Baked custard recurs in nineteenth-century sickroom chapters for the same reason beef tea and gruel do: it delivers protein and fat in a form requiring no chewing and little digestion, and it can be made from three things any household already had. The invalid-cookery sections of books like this one were a serious part of domestic medicine at a time when nursing happened at home and doctors prescribed diet as much as drugs, and their recipes are marked by small quantities, minimal seasoning, and an insistence on dainty presentation to tempt an appetite. The nutmeg is the one indulgence, and it is traditional rather than incidental — grated nutmeg on custard goes back to English cookery well before this book, when the spice was held, in folk and humoral tradition, to settle the stomach as well as flavour the dish.