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Cup Custards
4 cups scalded milk 4 eggs 4 tablespoons sugar 1/4 teaspoon salt Grated nutmeg Beat the eggs with the sugar and salt; add the milk and pour into cups, grating nutmeg over each. Set the cups in a pan of hot water and bake in a slow oven until the custard is set. Test by running a silver knife through the custard: if it comes out clean the custard is done. Overcooking will make the custard “watery."
A plain baked custard in the classic proportion of one egg to one cup of milk. The recipe is sound as written; only the oven language and a few mechanics need translating.
- Oven temperatureA "slow oven" here is 300-325F. Custard sets by protein coagulation, not by browning, and a hotter oven will curdle the edges before the centre firms.
- Scalded milkHeat the milk to just below a simmer, when steam rises and bubbles ring the pan, around 180F. Scalding is usually explained as a way of killing souring organisms in unpasteurised milk; whatever the original reason, it shortens baking time and helps the sugar dissolve.
- Temper the eggsAdd the hot milk to the beaten eggs in a thin stream while whisking. Dumping it in at once will scramble them, and no amount of careful baking will recover the texture.
- The water bathUse hot, not boiling, water and bring it two-thirds up the sides of the cups. A folded towel or a rack under the cups keeps the bottoms from taking direct heat off the pan.
- TimingExpect 35-45 minutes for six-ounce cups. Pull them when the centres still wobble slightly as a unit; residual heat finishes the set.
- The knife testNothing in the silver itself is essential; the test works with any thin blade inserted an inch from the rim. Mrs. Fryer's warning about "watery" custard is exact: overbaked egg protein tightens and squeezes out its liquid, so the weeping is a symptom of too much heat, not too little.
- YieldRoughly six custard cups, or eight small ramekins. Serve chilled or barely warm.
- NutmegGrate it over the filled cups just before baking. Pre-ground nutmeg loses much of its aroma.
Baked cup custard is a long-established dish in the English-language repertoire, a descendant of the medieval "crustade" — a pastry case filled with a milk-and-egg mixture, and generally taken to be the source of the word custard. By the time loose-leaf cookbooks like Mrs. Fryer's were sold to American housewives in the early twentieth century, the pastry had been dropped and the mixture baked in individual cups, which made it a standby of invalid cookery and children's suppers as much as a dessert: cheap, needing only what any household with a milkman already had, and digestible. The insistence on a slow oven and a pan of water reflects a period when ovens had no thermostats and a cook judged heat by hand and by experience, which is why the recipe leans so heavily on the knife test instead of a clock.