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Boiled Custard
1 pint milk. Pinch salt. 1 teaspoon butter. 3 egg yolks. 1 cup sugar. 1 tablespoon cornstarch.
Put milk in double boiler, add salt and butter. Mix cornstarch with a little cold milk. When milk is ready to boil stir in cornstarch, then the yolks that have been well beaten with sugar. Cook until thick; add whites beaten stiff just before taking off fire or pour over them and fold into the custard. This is good without whites and a nice way to use yolks. Fruit may be added to this or served in glasses over fruit.
This is a good foundation for cornstarch pudding, cabinet pudding, using double quantity of cornstarch. Make meringue of whites.
A stirred custard thickened with both yolks and cornstarch, which makes it far more forgiving than a pure egg custard. The instructions assume you know what "cook until thick" looks like; the notes below fill in the numbers.
- The hinge: heat, but do not boilEgg yolks curdle above about 185F, though the cornstarch here gives them some protection. The double boiler is what keeps it safe: keep the water below the top pan at a simmer, not a rolling boil, and stir constantly. Pull it when it coats a spoon and a finger drawn across leaves a clean track, around 175-180F.
- SugarA full cup of sugar to a pint of milk is very sweet by modern standards. Half a cup gives a custard most modern palates will prefer, and two-thirds if you are pouring it over tart fruit.
- Temper the yolksThe recipe says to stir the beaten yolks straight into hot milk. Whisk a ladleful of the hot milk into the yolk-sugar mixture first, then return it all to the pan — the cornstarch protects against curdling, but tempering makes the result reliably smooth.
- The beaten whitesWhites folded into custard just off the heat are barely cooked; the residual heat is not enough to pasteurize them. Use pasteurized whites if you want them folded in, or take the recipe's own alternative and bake them as a meringue. The custard is very good without them, as Mrs. Wilson notes.
- Cornstarch pudding and cabinet pudding"Double quantity of cornstarch" means two tablespoons to the pint, which sets to a firm spoonable pudding, enough to bind sponge cake and fruit into a cabinet pudding, though turning a pudding out of a mould generally takes more starch than that. That version should be held at a bare simmer briefly so the starch thickens fully.
- Yield and servingA pint of milk makes roughly two and a half to three cups of custard -- four small glasses. Serve warm as a sauce over fruit or cake, or chill with plastic wrap pressed to the surface to stop a skin forming.
- Filed under vegetablesIf the page sits under a vegetable heading, that reflects the original volume's arrangement rather than any claim about the dish. Nothing here is a vegetable.
"Boiled custard" is a misnomer: the one thing it must never do is boil. The name is usually explained as distinguishing custard cooked over water from custard baked in the oven. Mrs. Mary A. Wilson wrote for the Ladies' Home Journal and taught food conservation in Philadelphia, and the thrift of this recipe is of a piece with that -- cornstarch stretches three yolks into a pint of custard, the whites are accounted for rather than wasted, and one formula is made to serve as sauce, dessert, pudding base and meringue. The dish descends from the English stirred custards of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, and survives most vigorously in the American South, where boiled custard is still drunk from a glass around the holidays.