One Egg (III)
Ingredients.
One gill of Milk.
One teaspoonful of Castor Sugar.
Eight drops of Essence of Vanilla.
Break the egg into a milk saucepan, add the sugar, milk, and vanilla, and whisk it over the fire till it thickens, taking care that it does not curdle. ( 161 )
This is a single-egg custard sauce — crème anglaise in miniature — and it lives or dies on heat control. The recipe title carries the egg; the ingredient list assumes you have already read it.
- The hinge: never let it boilEgg proteins set from about 150F and curdle above roughly 185F, so hold the pan over gentle heat and pull it the moment the sauce coats the back of a spoon (170-175F). If it does begin to grain, strain it at once through a fine sieve into a cold bowl and whisk hard.
- A gillIn a British book of this period a gill is a quarter of an imperial pint, 5 fl oz, or about two-thirds of a US cup. An American gill is 4 fl oz; the smaller quantity gives a thicker sauce, which is no disaster.
- Castor sugarSuperfine sugar. Ordinary granulated will dissolve perfectly well in warm milk; caster simply melts faster and avoids any grittiness in a sauce that is never boiled.
- Essence of vanillaEight drops is roughly an eighth of a teaspoon of modern extract. Period essences varied wildly in strength, so taste rather than count drops.
- A milk saucepanA small lipped pan, usually enamelled or lined, kept for milk. Any small heavy-based pan works; if you are nervous, use a bowl over barely simmering water, which costs a few extra minutes and removes most of the risk.
- WhiskingBreak the egg into the cold pan and whisk it smooth with the sugar before the milk goes in.
- Yield and servingAbout three-quarters of a cup once the egg is counted in — enough sauce for two portions of steamed pudding, poached fruit or a baked tart. Serve warm, or cover the surface with a disc of paper to stop a skin forming as it cools.
Numbered exercises like this one sit in the cookery-school tradition of late Victorian and Edwardian instruction. The sauce itself is a thin crème anglaise, the pouring custard that English kitchens had been making since the eighteenth century and that French practice codified as one of the base sweet sauces. Vanilla essence, commercially bottled and cheap by the end of the nineteenth century, is what makes the recipe read as modern rather than Georgian, where the flavouring would more likely have been a bay leaf, orange-flower water or a scrap of lemon peel steeped in the milk.