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Custard Sauce
Follow the recipe for Boiled Custard in the chapter on "Puddings and Desserts." 1/2 tablespoon butter 3 tablespoons sugar Yolk of 1 egg
This is a cross-reference entry rather than a standalone recipe: it sends you to the boiled custard in the puddings chapter and supplies the proportions for a sauce-sized batch. A few gaps need filling before it works at the stove.
- The missing quantityNo liquid is listed, because it was assumed from the master recipe. Boiled-custard proportions of the period vary, but somewhere around a cup of milk to a yolk would be usual, which would make this roughly a cupful of sauce. Anyone without the original puddings chapter is guessing, and it is fair to say so.
- The hinge: do not let it boilA one-yolk custard has very little protein holding it together and will curdle the moment it simmers. Cook it in a double boiler or over low heat, stirring constantly, and pull it at 170-180F, when it coats the back of a spoon and a drawn finger leaves a clean track.
- "Boiled" is a misnomerNineteenth- and early twentieth-century books commonly call a stirred stove-top custard a boiled custard, in contrast to a baked one. It is not actually boiled.
- The butterHalf a tablespoon of butter in a stirred custard is unusual by modern standards and does nothing for thickening; it enriches the mouthfeel and gives a slight gloss. Whisk it in off the heat at the end, not at the start.
- Insurance against curdlingA scant teaspoon of cornstarch slaked with a little of the cold milk raises the curdling point considerably and is invisible in the finished sauce. Purists will object; it saves a thin custard more often than not.
- Strain and chillPour the finished sauce through a fine sieve to catch any set threads of egg, then cool it uncovered before refrigerating. A pouring custard is generally served cold, and it thickens noticeably as it chills.
- YieldAbout 1 cup on the assumption above, enough for four small servings. Double or triple the proportions as written; they scale cleanly.
- KeepingA lightly cooked one-yolk custard keeps two days refrigerated at most. It reheats badly and is apt to break, so make it in the quantity you intend to use.
Stirred egg custard is the same preparation the French call crème anglaise and English kitchens called simply pouring custard or boiled custard. Its appearance here, with a pointer back to the puddings chapter, is a neat illustration of how cook books were built: cross-references saved reprinting a master method in every section where it was needed. The pairing of cold custard sauce with ice creams and frozen puddings was standard in American household cookery of the era, when a moulded frozen dessert was the expected finish to a company dinner and a thin custard poured around it did the work that a fruit coulis or caramel does now. Note also the economy of the proportions: one yolk, a few spoonfuls of sugar, a scrap of butter.