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Custard Sauce (for Sweet Pud- dings or Tarts)
INGREDIENTS for sufficient for 1 large pudding. pint of milk, 2 eggs, 3 oz. of pounded sugar, 1 tablespoonful of brandy. AVERAGE COST, 5d. Put the milk in a very clean saucepan, and let it boil. Beat the eggs, stir to them the milk and pounded sugar, and put the mixture into a jug. Place the jug in a saucepan of boiling water; keep stirring well until it thickens, but do not allow it to boil, or it will curdle. Serve the sauce in a tureen, stir in the brandy, and grate a little nutmeg over the top. This sauce may be made very much nicer by using cream instead of milk; but the above recipe will be found quite good enough for ordinary purposes.
A plain crème anglaise, thickened in a jug set in boiling water rather than in the pan itself. The method is slow but almost foolproof, and the one rule is the one Mrs Beeton gives: it must not boil.
- The pintAn imperial pint is 20 fl oz, so about 2 1/2 US cups (roughly 570 ml). If you scale by US pints you will end up with a noticeably thinner sauce for the same two eggs.
- Pounded sugarSugar crushed fine in a mortar, as sugar was commonly sold in loaves or lumps that had to be broken down at home. Use caster or superfine sugar; 3 oz is about 85 g, or a scant half cup, which makes a distinctly sweet sauce by current taste. Two ounces is closer to modern preference.
- Two eggs to a pintVictorian eggs were generally smaller than today's large eggs, and two whole eggs to a pint of milk gives a pouring sauce, not a set custard. Expect something that coats the back of a spoon thinly. Using yolks only, four or five to the pint, gives a richer sauce.
- The jug in the saucepanThis is a bain-marie by improvisation. A heatproof bowl over barely simmering water does the same job; keep the water below the base of the bowl so the custard is heated by steam rather than by contact.
- The temperature that mattersEgg custard thickens between about 170 and 180F (77-82C) and scrambles above roughly 185F. A thermometer removes all the guesswork here. If it does catch and go grainy, tipping it at once into a cold bowl and whisking hard will often rescue it.
- TemperingThe instruction to boil the milk and then stir it into the beaten eggs works only if you pour slowly, in a thin stream, whisking throughout. Adding hot milk all at once to two eggs will cook them on contact.
- The brandyStirred in at the end, off the heat, as written. Alcohol added earlier is generally thought to destabilise the egg proteins and make curdling likelier. A tablespoon in a pint is a background note rather than a flavour.
- Yield and servingAbout 2 1/2 cups, enough for six to eight servings poured over a pudding or tart. Serve warm from a jug, or cover the surface directly with film if it is to stand, or it will skin.
Custard sauce of this kind is the English relative of French crème anglaise, and the name is often said to reflect the fact that the thin pouring custard was what English cooks put over their puddings. Isabella Beeton's Book of Household Management (1861) and the later All About Cookery compilations drawn from it give graduations of the same sauce, offering cream in place of milk, and the closing sentence here is characteristic of the book's whole outlook: it names the better version, then tells the reader what will do. The average cost of 5d. is part of that same accounting habit, one of the features that made the Beeton household books so useful to their readers. The jug-in-a-saucepan trick belongs to a kitchen without a double boiler as standard equipment, and it survived in British domestic cookery well into the twentieth century, until powdered custard made from cornflour and colouring displaced the egg version in many households.