Home › Invalid Recipes › Savory Custard
Savory Custard
1 gill (1/4 pint) beef tea Salt 1 egg Beat up the egg, add to it the beef tea and a pinch of salt; pour into a buttered earthenware custard cup, cover with a buttered paper, and steam until set.
A single-portion sickroom dish: essentially a savoury version of a baked custard, with beef broth standing in for the milk and sugar. Almost everything depends on keeping the water below a rolling boil.
- Gentle heat is the whole recipeEgg mixtures of this kind set somewhere around 170F/76C; if the steaming water boils hard, the custard curdles into watery curds and weeping liquid. The recipe gives no time, only 'until set'; at a bare shiver expect roughly 20-30 minutes.
- A gillA quarter pint, so about 5 fl oz in imperial measure or a generous half cup. One egg to that much liquid gives a very soft, spoonable set, which is what was wanted.
- Beef teaNot stock and not a bouillon cube. Beef tea was lean beef, finely shredded, steeped in water at low heat for an hour or more and strained -- pale brown, unthickened, barely seasoned. A light unsalted homemade beef broth is the nearest thing; a cube will be far too salty for a dish the recipe seasons with only a pinch of salt.
- Strain before pouringBeat the egg thoroughly, then pass the mixture through a fine sieve. Any stringy albumen left in will show up as tough threads in a custard this delicate.
- The custard cup and the paperAny small ovenproof ramekin or teacup works. The buttered paper is there to stop condensation dripping onto the surface and pitting it -- buttered parchment or a loose square of foil does the same job.
- Steaming without a steamerStand the cup on a folded cloth or a trivet in a covered pan with water reaching halfway up the sides. The cloth keeps the base off direct heat, which is where curdling starts.
- DonenessThe centre should wobble as a single mass rather than ripple as liquid; a knife tip inserted at the edge comes out clean. Overcooked, it will shrink from the cup and leak.
- YieldOne serving, and a small one: on the order of 80-100 calories and roughly 6-7g of protein, nearly all of it from the egg. It was meant as a light feed, not a meal.
"Invalid cookery" was a fixed department of English and American cookbooks from the mid-nineteenth century into the 1920s, and beef tea was its cornerstone: doctors and nurses of the period believed a clear meat infusion carried the nourishment of beef in a form a weak stomach could absorb, an idea encouraged by the commercial meat extracts that followed Liebig's work on meat extract, published from the 1840s and commercialised from the mid-1860s. Later nutritional analysis showed beef tea holds very little protein -- mostly salts, gelatine and flavour -- which is exactly the gap this recipe closes by beating in an egg, turning a drink into something with real food value that still requires no chewing. Similar egg-and-broth custards, steamed rather than baked, appear across European and Japanese cooking, where the same technique produces chawanmushi.