Home › Desserts › Baked Sherry Custard
Baked Sherry Custard
Use rule for Baked Vanilla Custard, flavoring with one tablespoon sherry wine.
All other flavored custards may be made the same way, by substituting special flavorings.
Baked Caramel Custard No. I 1 cup sugar 4 egg yolks 2 cups milk 1 teaspoon vanilla 4 cup sugar ¼ teaspoon salt Caramelize the one cup of sugar. When a delicate brown color, pour into a well-buttered charlotte russe mold or into individual cups; set away to cool.
Scald milk; mix eggs, one fourth cup of sugar, and salt, add milk; strain into mold on to cold caramel; add seasoning and bake the same as Baked Vanilla Custard. Unmold and serve with caramel sauce.
Baked Caramel Custard No. 2 3 cups milk * cups sugar 4 eggs ½ teaspoon salt 1 teaspoon vanilla Scald milk; caramelize sugar and add to scalded milk. Beat eggs slightly, add salt, milk mixture and flavoring. Strain into buttered dish and bake like Baked Vanilla Custard. Unmold and serve with caramel sauce.
This rule may be made with three eggs, but will be less rich and will break when unmolded.
Three related custards on one page: a sherry-flavored version of the book's plain baked custard, and two caramel custards. The base method they all lean on is a stirred custard baked in a water bath, so that technique is worth spelling out.
- The hinge: a water bath and a low ovenBaked custards set at around 170 to 180F and curdle if pushed much past that. The book sends you to its own Baked Vanilla Custard rule, which is not on this page; period practice was a moderate oven with the mold standing in a pan of hot water. A modern equivalent is about 325F with hot water reaching halfway up the mold, pulling the custard when the edges are firm and the center still trembles -- very roughly 40 to 50 minutes for individual cups and longer for a single large mold.
- Sherry quantityThe vanilla base rule is not reprinted here, so the proportion is uncertain; one tablespoon in a custard of two cups or so would be a whisper. A cream or medium-dry sherry will read more strongly than a fino, and adding it to the cooled milk-and-egg mixture rather than to hot milk keeps more of the aroma.
- Missing fractions in the ingredient listsSeveral quantities in the caramel custards have lost their fractions and read as whole numbers: the quarter cup of sugar and quarter teaspoon of salt in No. 1, and the sugar in No. 2. Work from the proportions the page does give: No. 1 uses 4 yolks to 2 cups milk, No. 2 uses 4 whole eggs to 3 cups, and the closing note indicates that fewer eggs than that will not hold when turned out.
- Caramelizing the sugarMelt the sugar dry over medium heat, swirling rather than stirring, and stop at a medium amber; taken darker it turns bitter, taken lighter it tastes only of sugar. Pour it into the mold at once, as it hardens quickly.
- Charlotte russe moldA plain, usually slightly flared tin mold, in the region of a quart and a half. Any metal or ceramic mold, a loaf pan, or a set of ramekins will do.
- Number of eggsThe note at the end is accurate. Four eggs to three cups of milk gives a custard firm enough to turn out; three eggs gives a softer set that is better eaten from the dish.
- UnmoldingChill the baked custard thoroughly, several hours or overnight, before turning it out. The hardened caramel in the bottom will have dissolved into syrup by then and pours over the custard as its own sauce, which makes the additional caramel sauce optional.
- YieldThe No. 2 formula, on three cups of milk, serves six.
Custard baked over a floor of hardened caramel is the dish the French call crème renversée au caramel and Spanish-speaking kitchens call flan; American cookbooks of the 1900s generally printed it simply as "caramel custard," and, as here, treated it as one variation in a long family built on a single vanilla base. That modular approach — learn one custard, then swap the flavoring — was standard in the domestic-science era, when cookbooks were written to teach method rather than to collect dishes. The sherry version belongs to an older English tradition of wine-scented custards and possets, and it survived into American desserts of this period partly through trifle, where sherry and custard are inseparable.