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Caramel Custard
4 cups scalded milk 1/2 cup sugar 1 teaspoon vanilla 4 eggs 1/4 teaspoon salt Melt the sugar until it is light brown in color; add it to the milk. Beat the eggs; add the milk and sugar, salt and flavoring, and bake in cups as directed for cup custards. Serve with caramel sauce.
A plain baked custard given its flavour by dry-caramelised sugar rather than by extra sweetening. The instructions lean on a cross-reference the loose-leaf format assumed you had to hand, so the method for baking cup custards is worth spelling out.
- Caramel first, and watch itMelt the half cup of sugar dry in a heavy pan over medium heat until it is the colour of light amber. Sugar goes from light brown to acrid in under a minute, and the burnt note carries straight through four cups of milk.
- Add the caramel off the heatMolten sugar meeting hot milk will spit and seize into lumps. Take the milk off the burner, pour the caramel in slowly while whisking, and return it to low heat briefly to dissolve any hardened threads.
- Scalded milkHeated to about 180F, when it steams and bubbles ring the edge of the pan, not to a rolling boil. Let it cool a little before it meets the eggs, or temper it in gradually.
- Temper the eggsThe recipe says to add the milk to the beaten eggs, and the order matters. Pour a cup of the hot milk into the eggs in a thin stream while whisking, then add the rest; reversing it gives you sweet scrambled egg.
- Cup custards means a water bathStrain the mixture, fill custard cups or ramekins, and set them in a roasting pan with hot water reaching halfway up their sides. Without it the outsides curdle before the centres set.
- Oven temperatureThe recipe gives none, relying on the cup-custard cross-reference. Bake at 325 to 350F for 35 to 45 minutes depending on cup size.
- Judging donenessThe custard is done when a knife inserted an inch from the edge comes out clean and the centre still trembles; internal temperature 170 to 175F. It firms as it cools, and carryover heat past 180F will weep.
- YieldFour cups of milk and four eggs fills six to eight standard custard cups. Serve barely warm or chilled.
Baked custard is one of the oldest continuously made English sweets, and by the time Mrs. Fryer was compiling her loose-leaf book in the early twentieth century it had settled into a proportion of one egg to one cup of milk, one of several ratios in common use. What distinguishes this version is the dry-melted sugar: caramelising sugar to a light brown before dissolving it in the milk gives a flavour that plain sugar cannot. The direction to bake "as directed for cup custards" and to serve with a caramel sauce reflects how these books worked -- each leaf assumed the surrounding pages, and a cook was expected to know the water bath by heart. Caramel custard here is a baked custard flavoured with caramel, not the inverted flan of crème caramel, where the sugar is poured into the mould first and becomes a sauce when the custard is turned out.