Home › Desserts › Arrowroot Custard
Arrowroot Custard
2 cups milk 2 tablespoons arrowroot teaspoon vanilla 2 egg yolks 1/4 teaspoon salt 4 cup sugar Scald milk; mix arrowroot and sugar; add to scalded milk, and cook three minutes. Beat egg yolks slightly; add salt; pour milk mixture on to eggs; return to double boiler; stir constantly until thickened.
Cool, flavor, and serve in custard cups.
A stovetop custard thickened with both arrowroot and egg yolk, which makes it more forgiving than a plain boiled custard. The whole dish hangs on keeping the eggs below the point where they scramble.
- Quantities as printedThe sugar is given as "4 cup" and the vanilla simply as "teaspoon" with no fraction; a quarter cup of sugar and a teaspoon of vanilla are the proportions this style of custard normally uses for 2 cups of milk. Treat both as approximate rather than exact instruction.
- Arrowroot behaves unlike cornstarchIt thickens at a lower temperature, clears rather than clouds, and breaks down if held at a hard boil or stirred aggressively once set. The three minutes of cooking is meant to hydrate the starch, not to reduce the milk.
- Dry-mix the starchCombining the arrowroot with the sugar before it meets liquid is the step that prevents lumps. Do not skip it and do not add the dry mix to boiling milk all at once.
- TemperingPouring the hot milk onto the yolks and then returning the lot to the double boiler is deliberate. Reversed, the yolks are liable to curdle.
- DonenessOff the heat when it coats the back of a spoon and a finger drawn across leaves a clear track; by modern thermometer that is somewhere around 170-180F, though the book gives no temperature. Arrowroot custard thins if pushed much past that.
- Flavor lastVanilla is added after cooling for a reason: alcohol-based extract loses much of its aroma in a hot pan.
- YieldAbout 2 cups, enough for four small custard cups. Chill covered, with plastic touching the surface if you dislike a skin, and eat within two days.
Lowney's Cook Book came out of the Walter M. Lowney Company, a Boston chocolate manufacturer, and it carried a full complement of ordinary family recipes alongside the chocolate ones. Arrowroot, a starch from the rhizome of Maranta arundinacea, reached American kitchens largely through the West Indies trade and had a double reputation: a fine, clear thickener for delicate desserts, and an invalid food, gentle enough for children and convalescents. Cookbooks of the period commonly filed arrowroot puddings and gruels under sickroom cookery. Its appearance here as a custard enriched with yolks and vanilla may suggest the ingredient making the crossing from medicine chest to table.