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Strawberry Custard
Use recipe for Soft Custard. When cold, add one cup of crushed and sweetened strawberries. Serve ice-cold and garnish with strawberry meringue.
A two-line variation that leans entirely on a base recipe printed elsewhere in the book. Everything that can go wrong here happens in the custard and at the moment the fruit meets it.
- The base custardA soft (stirred, boiled) custard of this period is roughly 2 cups scalded milk, 4 egg yolks or 2 whole eggs plus 2 yolks, 1/3 cup sugar and a pinch of salt, flavoured with vanilla after cooking. It is cooked over hot, not boiling, water and stirred until it coats the back of a spoon.
- The hinge: temperatureStirred custard sets at 175-180F and scrambles not far above. Use a double boiler or very low direct heat, pull it the moment it coats a spoon and leaves a clean track when you draw a finger through, and strain it into a cold bowl at once.
- Add the fruit cold, to coldThe instruction "when cold" matters practically: berries stirred into warm custard risk thinning it and can encourage the eggs to curdle, and the dish is meant to be served ice-cold in any case. Chill the custard thoroughly first, then fold the berries in.
- Crushed and sweetenedCrush a generous cup of hulled berries with 2 to 3 tablespoons of sugar and let them stand 20 minutes. Drain off part of the syrup before folding them in, or the custard will thin to a soup; the drained syrup is worth spooning over the top.
- Strawberry meringueThe recipe does not describe the garnish; it is presumably a meringue flavoured or tinted with strawberry, either poached or baked dry, set on the custard. Plain whipped cream or a plain poached meringue serves the same purpose if you would rather not make it.
- ServingThis is a spoon dessert, served in glasses or shallow cups rather than cut. The base quantity above gives about four servings.
- KeepingEgg-thickened custard with fresh fruit stirred in will not hold. Refrigerate and eat within a day; the berries weep and the custard slackens after that.
Lowney's Cook Book was compiled by Maria Willett Howard and published in 1907 for the Walter M. Lowney Company, a Boston chocolate manufacturer, which explains the book's heavy freight of cocoa and confectionery recipes and its generally modern, brand-conscious tone. This entry shows how such books were built: a stock preparation is given once in full, then spun out into a page of variations, each a line or two long. Soft or "boiled" custard, a stirred sauce rather than a baked one, was the workhorse of the American dessert chapter, serving as a sauce for puddings, the pool under floating island, and, as here, a base thinned and coloured with whatever fruit was in season. Strawberries were the first real fruit of the New England summer, and cookbooks of the period cluster them into short bursts of recipes to be used while the local crop lasted.