Home › Desserts-Puddings › Baked Custard
Baked Custard
2 eggs. 2 C milk. 4 T sugar. Pinch salt 14 t vanilla Little grated nutmeg Beat eggs slightly, add rest of ingredients and bake in buttered cups in a pan of hot water. Makes three servings.
A plain baked custard set in a water bath, the standard church-supper dessert of the period. The original leaves oven heat and timing to the cook's judgment, so those are the gaps worth filling.
- Oven heatBake at about 325F. The hotter the oven, the greater the risk of the eggs curdling and the custard weeping, even inside a water bath; many recipes do use 350F, but the lower heat is safer.
- The water bath is the hingeThe pan of hot water is not optional insulation; it is what keeps the custard below the temperature at which egg protein tightens and separates. Fill it to two-thirds the depth of the cups with water already hot from the tap or kettle.
- TimingIndividual cups take roughly 30 to 40 minutes. Test by inserting a thin knife an inch from the edge: it should come out clean while the center still trembles slightly. The residual heat finishes the middle.
- "Beat eggs slightly"This is deliberate. A frothy beaten egg carries air bubbles that set as a foam and spoil the smooth body, which is why old recipes say slightly and mean it. Straining the mixture before it goes into the cups is worth the extra minute.
- Buttered cupsButter matters only if you intend to unmold. Custard served in the cup needs none, and a well-buttered cup can leave a greasy film on the surface.
- NutmegGrate it over the filled cups rather than stirring it in, so it stays on the surface where the aroma is noticeable. Whole nutmeg on a fine rasp is markedly stronger than the pre-ground jar.
- ServingThree small custard cups. Good warm, better thoroughly chilled; they keep two days covered in the refrigerator.
Baked custard is one of the oldest sweet dishes in the English kitchen, and it survived into twentieth-century American community cookbooks precisely because it asked so little: eggs, milk, sugar, and an oven with a pan of water in it. A recipe of this kind is written for readers already assumed to know the technique, which is why the heat and the timing go unstated. The water bath itself, the bain-marie of French practice, was familiar to cooks who had made a custard or a cheesecake. The nutmeg is the period's signature: grated over the top of custards, milk puddings and eggnogs alike, it had long been the default sweet spice of Anglo-American dairy cookery.