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Strawberry Custards
5 eggs 1 teaspoonful strawberry ex- ½ lb. (1 cup) ripe strawtract berries or strawberry 4 ozs. (4 heaping tablespoonjam 1½ lemon fuls) sugar Few drops red coloring
The page has come through scanning as two interleaved columns, so the ingredients read as nonsense until they are untangled; the method has been lost entirely. Read as a list, it runs: 5 eggs; 1 teaspoonful strawberry extract; ½ lb. (1 cup) ripe strawberries or strawberry jam; 1½ lemon; 4 ozs. (4 heaping tablespoonfuls) sugar; a few drops red colouring.
- No method survivesNothing on the page tells you how to combine or cook the mixture. Treat this as an ingredient record rather than a working recipe, and follow a current baked or stirred custard method for proportions and timing.
- A missing liquidFive eggs with no milk or cream listed is not a custard as the word is normally used. Either the dairy was specified in the surrounding text of the book, or the fruit and lemon juice were meant to carry the eggs — the page as printed does not say which.
- The sugar is contradictoryFour ounces of granulated sugar is roughly half a cup, more than four heaping tablespoons would hold. The two measures do not agree; the weight is the safer figure to follow.
- "1½ lemon"Almost certainly juice, possibly juice and grated rind, of one and a half lemons — the original never says. That is a sharp amount against 4 oz of sugar, and acid added to an egg mixture before cooking will encourage curdling if it goes in hot.
- Strawberry extractA flavouring essence of the sort sold alongside vanilla and almond extract. It is still made but is scarce; the fruit or jam does most of the work here and the extract can be left out.
- Red colouringCoal-tar (aniline) dyes were in use for colouring food in this period. Modern food colouring is the direct replacement, and a few drops means a few drops; cooked strawberry tends to go brownish, though the page does not say what the colouring was intended to do.
Fruit custards belong to the long English tradition of egg-thickened sweets that runs from medieval "crustades" — the baked custard in its pastry crust that gave the word — down to the nursery puddings of the late nineteenth century. What dates this particular version is the bottle of strawberry extract and the few drops of red colouring: by the turn of the century commercial flavouring essences and aniline food dyes were cheap and widely sold. Enthusiasm for cooking in fireproof earthenware was a feature of Edwardian and American kitchens, where a dish that went from oven to table saved both fuel and washing up.