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Baked Custard
Boil a quart or three pints of cream, or rich milk, with cinnamon, and three dozen beaten peach kernels, tied in a piece of muslin, or you may substitute some other flavoring, if you choose. After boiling, let it cool. Then beat the yolks of fourteen eggs and whites of four, sweeten and strain in a pitcher. After it has settled, pour it in cups and set them in the oven, putting around them as much boiling water as will reach nearly to the top of the cups. Let it boil till you see a scum rising on top the custard. It will require at least ten minutes to bake.--Mrs. R.
Baked Custard.
Seven eggs; one quart milk; three tablespoonfuls sugar. Flavor to taste.--Mrs. Dr. E.
Baked Custard.
Scald eight teacups milk. (Be careful not to boil it.) After cooling, stir into it eight eggs and two teacups sugar. Bake in a dish or cups. Set in a stove pan and surround with water, but not enough to boil into the custard cups. An own for baking puddings is the right temperature. Bake when the custard in set, which will be in twenty minutes.--Mrs. J. J. A.
Three separate contributors' custards are printed here under one heading. The first one cannot be made, because of what is steeped in the cream.
- Why the peach kernels are the problemPeach stones contain amygdalin, which releases hydrogen cyanide when the kernels are crushed and wetted — exactly what "three dozen beaten peach kernels" steeped in hot cream accomplishes. This was the period's cheap stand-in for bitter almond, and it carries the same hazard. Three dozen crushed kernels infused into a quart of cream is not a trace flavouring; there is no safe way to judge the dose at home, and the muslin bag does not hold back the dissolved compound.
- The alternative flavouring is not a fixMrs. R. offers "some other flavoring, if you choose," but the rest of her method is unclear: "Let it boil till you see a scum rising on top the custard" may refer to the surrounding water rather than the custard, and if the custard itself is taken that far it will pass the point at which egg proteins tighten and weep, and curdle. Use a current baked custard recipe rather than trying to repair this one.
- Egg counts vary wildly between the threeFourteen yolks plus four whites to a quart or three pints is a very rich set; Mrs. Dr. E. uses seven whole eggs to a quart of milk; Mrs. J. J. A. uses eight eggs to eight teacups of milk. These are three different desserts, not three versions of one.
- Teacups and "an own for baking puddings"A nineteenth-century teacup is smaller than a modern measuring cup and its capacity was not standardised, so eight teacups may amount to appreciably more than two quarts' worth of modern cups — treat the volume as approximate. "An own" appears to be a typesetter's error for "an oven" — that is, the same heat used for baked puddings. No temperature is given.
- Scald, do not boilMrs. J. J. A.'s parenthesis is the one genuinely useful instruction on the page. Milk taken to a full boil forms a skin, scorches on the pan bottom, and gives the finished custard a cooked-milk flavour.
- The water bathTwo of the three set the cups in a pan of hot water (Mrs. Dr. E. gives no method), and the reason is unchanged: the water holds the outside of the custard below the temperature at which the eggs would curdle. Keep the level well under the rims, as the third recipe warns.
Housekeeping in Old Virginia, compiled by Marion Cabell Tyree and published in 1877, gathers contributions from a large number of named and initialled housekeepers, which is why three baked custards sit side by side here with no attempt to reconcile them — the book preserves each woman's hand rather than editing them into one standard method. Peach-kernel flavouring, which appears in Southern and English cookery of the period, served as a household substitute for bitter almonds or bought ratafia: the stones were free with every batch of preserved peaches, and the scent comes from the same compound, benzaldehyde. Such recipes are far less common in later American cookbooks, by which time almond extract was cheaply and commercially available. The custards themselves belong to an older English tradition of egg-thickened creams baked in individual cups.