Home › Pudding Recipes › Vanilla Custard
Vanilla Custard
1 pint (2 cups) milk 4 eggs 4 heaping tablespoonfuls (4 ozs.) sugar 1 teaspoonful vanilla extract Beat the eggs and the sugar together, then add the milk and the vanilla extract. Divide the mixture into buttered earthenware custard cups, cover with buttered papers, and steam gently for half an hour.
A plain steamed custard of the sort that appears in nearly every early twentieth-century casserole book. The proportions are generous with egg, so the set is firm rather than trembling.
- The hinge: gentle heatSteam means barely simmering water, not a rolling boil. Custard sets at around 175-180F; if the water boils hard the eggs curdle and the cups weep watery whey.
- Scale and yieldTwo cups milk with four eggs fills four to six standard 4-6 oz custard cups. Expect a dense, sliceable custard; using two whole eggs plus two yolks gives a softer result closer to modern baked custard.
- Sugar measureFour heaping tablespoons is given as 4 oz. Modern level tablespoons will not reach that, so weigh it: 115 g.
- Buttered papersRounds of buttered parchment laid directly on the cups. They keep condensation off the surface so it stays smooth. Foil or a lid on the steamer does the same job, but leave a small gap for steam to escape.
- Strain and restNot in the original, but pour the mixture through a fine sieve to catch bits of chalaza, and skim the foam from beating. Both otherwise show up as pocks in the finished surface.
- Steamer improvisedIf you have no steamer, set the cups in a deep pan on a folded towel or rack, pour in hot water to come halfway up, cover the pan and hold it at a bare tremble on the stovetop.
- Testing and servingDone when a knife inserted at the edge comes out clean and the centre still wobbles slightly; it firms as it cools. Serve warm or chilled, with stewed fruit or a dusting of nutmeg.
Steamed custard in cups belongs to the era when the earthenware casserole and the fireless cooker were both being sold to households as fuel-saving equipment, and books like this one seem to have been concerned, at least in part, with showing that a single glazed dish or set of cups could carry a meal from stove to table. Vanilla extract in a domestic recipe of this date is worth noting: cheap alcoholic extracts are generally said to have become widely available in the pantry only gradually over the course of the nineteenth century, and earlier custards were more often flavoured by infusing the milk with a split bean, lemon peel or bay leaf. The technique itself is much older than the flavouring, cooking egg and milk over water rather than direct fire being a method long favoured in medieval and early modern kitchens for anything liable to curdle, and the buttered paper cover does much the same work as the foil we still use over a bain-marie.