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Apple Custard
1 1/2 pint stewed apples. 1/2 pound sugar. Set them away til old. Beat six eggs very light, and stir in gradually a quart sweet milk. Mix all together, pour in a deep dish, and bake twenty minutes.--Mrs. F.
A baked apple custard in the plainest possible terms: sweetened apple pulp, eggs, milk, oven. The original gives no temperature and a baking time far too short for the volume of liquid involved.
- "Set them away til old"Almost certainly a printer's slip for "till cold." The sugar goes into the stewed apples, which are then left to cool completely before the egg-and-milk mixture is added. Adding hot apple to beaten eggs will scramble them.
- The measurements1 1/2 pint of stewed apples is 3 cups of thick unsweetened apple pulp — roughly 2 lb of apples cooked down. Half a pound of sugar is a generous cup, which suits pulp that has had nothing added to it; taste the apple first and scale back if it is already sweet.
- OvenNone is specified. Baked custards want 325-350F; hotter than that and the eggs curdle and weep at the edges before the center sets.
- TimeTwenty minutes will not set a quart of milk and six eggs in a deep dish. Expect 45 to 60 minutes at 325-350F, and go by the custard, not the clock.
- DonenessThe center should still wobble as a mass when the dish is nudged; a knife an inch from the edge comes out clean. An instant-read thermometer in the middle should show 170-175F. Carryover heat finishes it.
- Water bathNot mentioned, and not strictly required in a moderate oven, but setting the deep dish in a pan of hot water gives a smoother custard and forgives a few minutes of inattention.
- SeasoningMrs. F. adds nothing else. Grated nutmeg over the top before baking, or a spoonful of rosewater or lemon zest in the apple, is entirely in period and keeps the dish from tasting flat.
- YieldAbout eight servings. Serve barely warm or cold; a custard this loose is unpleasant hot and will firm up considerably in the refrigerator.
Housekeeping in Old Virginia (1879), compiled by Marion Cabell Tyree from contributions by some 250 Virginia housekeepers, is full of these initialed one-paragraph recipes — assumed knowledge written down for people who already knew what a custard should look like. No oven temperature appears, as was inevitable on stoves that could not yet be given numbers. Baked custards of eggs and milk are among the oldest sweet dishes in English cookery, and thickening or extending one with fruit pulp would have been ordinary household economy: apples kept in the cellar through winter, and softening fruit was presumably best dealt with by stewing. The result sits between a custard and what an English cook would have called an apple pudding, and it invites comparison with the apple-and-egg fillings of transparent and chess pies in Southern baking, recipes for which were already current by the mid-nineteenth century.