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Amber Custard
4 eggs. 1 cup sugar. 1 cup sweet milk. 1/2 cup butter. 1 cup plum jelly. 1 tablespoon flour and meal mixed with sugar.
This is a formula rather than a method: Mrs. Wilson gives the proportions and expects the cook to know what to do with them. What follows fills in the gaps a 1920 reader would not have needed.
- No method is givenThe ingredients suggest a rich jellied custard of the transparent-pie family. A standard way of handling such proportions would be to cream the butter with the sugar, beat in the eggs one at a time, stir in the jelly until smooth, then the flour-and-meal blend, and lastly the milk. The recipe does not say whether it was meant for a pastry shell or a buttered dish, and a water bath is a modern precaution rather than an instruction in the text.
- Sweet milkNineteenth- and early twentieth-century books distinguish sweet milk from sour or buttermilk. It means ordinary fresh whole milk, and there is no substitution to make.
- "Flour and meal mixed with sugar"The one genuinely ambiguous line. Meal here is most likely cornmeal, which appears as a thickener in some jelly and transparent custards of the period, and the sugar is probably the cup already listed rather than an additional quantity. The tablespoon appears to cover the flour and meal together, perhaps half and half, though the text does not say.
- Plum jellyA clear, strained, well-set jelly, not jam or preserves. Damson is one plum jelly that would suit. Fruit pieces or skins will keep the custard from setting cleanly; if only jam is available, sieve it.
- OvenThe recipe gives no oven instruction. A custard of this kind is best baked in a moderate oven, in the region of 325-350F, until the centre is just barely mobile; a thermometer in the middle reading about 170F indicates a set custard. Higher heat curdles the egg and weeps liquid.
- The butterHalf a cup to four eggs is a great deal, and it is what gives this its chess-pie texture rather than a plain custard's. Do not reduce it expecting the same result, and let the custard cool fully before cutting or the butter-rich filling will run.
- YieldThe recipe gives no yield. The quantities would fill roughly one large pie shell, or a set of individual custard cups.
Amber custards and amber puddings belong to a long line of English and American sweets in which fruit jelly, butter and eggs are baked together into something translucent and gold-brown; the name is generally taken to refer to that colour. In the American South similar proportions turn up as transparent pie, jelly pie or chess pie, and jelly-based fillings had the practical advantage that a jar of home-made plum jelly kept when fresh fruit did not. The terse, ingredient-only form of this entry assumes a reader who already knew how a custard was assembled and needed only the proportions.