Custard
One pint good rich milk, 2 eggs (beaten lightly), sweeten to taste, flavor with nutmeg; bake. 1 cup molasses 1 cup milk 1/3 cup butter 3 cups flour
A bare-bones baked custard of the sort that filled the last inch of column space in turn-of-the-century community cookbooks. Note that the four lines following "bake" belong to a different recipe entirely — molasses, milk, butter and flour in those proportions is a soft molasses cake or gingerbread batter, not a custard — and appear to be a typesetting run-on.
- The hinge: low heat and a water bathBaked custard sets by egg protein coagulating, and it curdles into sweet scrambled egg above roughly 185F. Set the filled dish or cups in a pan of hot water and bake at 325F; the original gives neither temperature nor method.
- DonenessPull it when the edges are set and the centre still wobbles as a single mass — about 30 to 40 minutes for individual cups, 45 to 55 for one dish. A knife inserted an inch from the edge should come out clean. It finishes setting as it cools.
- Egg ratioTwo eggs to a pint of milk is on the lean side and gives a very soft, spoonable custard. Three eggs, or two eggs plus a yolk, produces the firmer set most cooks expect today.
- "Sweeten to taste"For a pint of milk, 3 to 4 tablespoons of sugar is the usual range. Beyond about a third of a cup the custard both tastes cloying and sets more slowly, since sugar raises the coagulation temperature.
- "Good rich milk"This meant unhomogenised whole milk with the cream still in it. Whole milk with a couple of tablespoons of cream substitutes closely; skim milk gives a thin, weepy custard.
- NutmegGrate it over the surface after the custard is in the dish rather than beating it into the mixture — it will speckle the top and scent the whole thing without settling to the bottom.
- Beating "lightly"This is deliberate. Whipping air into the eggs gives a foamy, pocked custard; stir just until the yolks and whites are combined, and skim any foam off the surface before baking.
- YieldA pint of milk with two eggs fills four small custard cups, serving four.
Baked custard descends from the medieval "crustade" — a term that originally referred to the pastry crust that held the egg-and-milk filling, and only later transferred to the filling itself. By the late nineteenth century, in compilations like Reliable Recipes, custard had become a household staple rather than a company dish: cheap, made from what was on hand, and prescribed for invalids and children because it was thought easy to digest. The vagueness here — "sweeten to taste," "bake," no temperature, no time — is characteristic of the genre. These books were written by cooks for cooks who already knew the dish and needed only the proportions to jog the memory.