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Soft Custard
½ teaspoon vanilla cup sugar 1 teaspoon salt Scald the milk in double boiler. Mix eggs, sugar and salt; add scalded milk to them; return to double boiler, and cook until mixture thickens and is of a smooth and creamy consistency.
Strain into a cold dish and flavor when cold. Should the custard begin to curdle, set immediately into a dish of cold water and beat briskly with a wire whisk or egg beater. Soft custard may be made with whole eggs, but it is not so velvety.
A stirred custard, the sauce the French call crème anglaise. Everything depends on heat control rather than timing.
- The hinge: temperature, not minutesThe custard thickens somewhere around 170F to 180F, and egg protein sets hard and the mixture breaks as it climbs toward boiling. An instant-read thermometer takes most of the guesswork out. The double boiler is there to keep the custard from exceeding the temperature of the water beneath it.
- ProportionsThe ingredient line as printed here is incomplete: the milk and egg quantities are missing, and the surviving sugar entry has lost its measure. Soft custards of this kind conventionally run somewhere between three and six yolks and 1/4 to 1/2 cup sugar per pint (2 cups) of milk, with salt in the range of a pinch to 1/4 teaspoon.
- SaltA full teaspoon of salt reads as far too much for a dessert custard at any ordinary household scale, and the recipe as printed gives no milk quantity to measure it against. Treat the salt figure in the printed list as suspect and season by taste, a pinch at a time.
- TemperingAdd the scalded milk to the eggs, as directed, doing it in a thin stream while whisking. Dumping it in at once cooks the yolks into threads that no amount of straining will fully rescue.
- Stir constantlyUse a flat wooden spoon or silicone spatula and keep the whole base of the pan moving; the custard sets first where it touches metal. It is done when it coats the back of the spoon and a finger drawn through leaves a clear track.
- The cold-water rescueKeep a bowl of ice water within reach before you start. If you see the first grainy specks, the pan must come off the heat and into the water instantly, with brisk whisking; a few seconds' delay is the difference between a save and scrambled eggs.
- Flavoring when coldVanilla is volatile and loses aroma in hot custard, which is why it goes in after cooling. Vanilla extract or scraped bean paste both work.
- Yield and servingA pint of milk with yolks gives roughly 2 1/2 cups, enough for six small cups or ample sauce for a fruit dessert, gingerbread or steamed pudding. Chill covered and use within two days.
Nineteenth- and early twentieth-century American cookbooks divided custards into two families: baked or "cup" custards, set firm in the oven, and soft or "boiled" custards, stirred on the stove and served as a sauce or in glasses. The soft version is the same preparation Escoffier-era French kitchens called crème anglaise, and its reputation for going wrong is why domestic-science writers of this period pushed the double boiler so hard, an insurance policy for cooks working over coal and wood ranges with no way to read a temperature. The note that whole eggs make a less velvety custard reflects the same school of careful, tested proportions: the white contributes water and sets at a higher temperature, giving a thinner, slightly more coagulated sauce. Lowney's was a Boston chocolate manufacturer, and its cookbook, compiled by Maria Willett Howard, carried a full run of ordinary household recipes alongside the chocolate work a plain custard being the base for chocolate sauces, floating island and frozen desserts elsewhere in the book.