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Puddings and Other Desserts Baked Custard
4 eggs 1/2 cup sugar 1/4 teaspoon salt 1 teaspoon vanilla extract 1 quart milk Beat eggs, sugar, salt and vanilla together; scald milk and add very slowly, stirring constantly. Put into greased baking dish or small molds; place in pan of water in slow oven and bake 30 to 40 minutes. Test with knife which will come out clean when custard is baked.
A plain baked custard of the kind that turns on temperature control rather than technique. The water bath and a genuinely low oven are what keep it silky.
- Slow ovenSet the oven to 300-325F. Anything hotter drives the eggs past coagulation into curds and weeping, no matter how carefully the milk was added.
- Scalding the milkScald means heating to about 180F, when a ring of small bubbles forms at the edge of the pan; it should not reach a rolling boil. Adding it slowly to the eggs while stirring is tempering, and rushing it will scramble them.
- The water bathThe pan of water should come halfway up the sides of the dish or molds, and hot tap water gets things going faster than cold. This is the hinge of the recipe: without it the outside of the custard sets long before the center.
- Timing by sizeThe recipe gives 30 to 40 minutes for either form. In practice small molds will be done toward the short end of that range, and a single quart-plus dish toward the long end or a little past it. Judge by the custard, not the clock.
- The knife testTest an inch from the edge, not dead center. The middle should still wobble slightly when the dish is nudged, since residual heat finishes it as it cools. An instant-read thermometer showing 170-175F is more reliable than the knife.
- YieldA quart of milk and four eggs fills six to eight ramekins of about 6 ounces. Serve barely warm or chilled.
- Optional grating of nutmegNutmeg dusted over the surface before baking is a common finish for baked custard, though this recipe does not call for it. Worth adding if you like it.
Baked custard is one of the oldest sweet uses of eggs and milk in English cookery, descended from the medieval "crustade" — a custard baked in a pastry crust, which is where the word comes from — with the crust eventually dropped and the filling baked alone in a dish. The recipe also reflects a kitchen where eggs and a quart of milk were cheap and ovens were unpredictable, hence the insistence on the water bath and the knife test rather than a stated temperature.