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California Cherry Custard
Make a thick compote of white cherries by stewing two quarts, pitted, with 3/4 pound of sugar and half cup of water till the juice is reduced to thick syrup. Spread this in a thick layer over the bottom of a four-quart pan. Make the custard according to the receipt preceding, pour it over the cherries and bake as usual. To dish up place a spoonful of cream in the ice-cream saucer and a neat spoonful of the cherry custard in that.
A baked custard set over a layer of cherry compote, from an era when a pastry cook expected to be told the compote and left to remember the custard. The one thing to get right is the oven: a custard this deep will curdle if it is pushed.
- The missing custardThe "receipt preceding" is not on this page, so you are supplying your own. Baked custards of the period commonly run about 6 eggs (or 4 eggs plus 4 yolks) to a quart of milk or half milk-half cream, with 4-6 oz sugar and vanilla; scale it to fill the pan over the fruit.
- White cherriesNot a distinct species but the pale-fleshed sweet cherries: Royal Ann, which is the American name for the Napoleon. They hold their shape and their blush-yellow colour in syrup, which is presumably the point of specifying them over dark Bings.
- QuantitiesTwo quarts of pitted cherries is roughly 2 1/2 lb of fruit; 3/4 lb sugar is about 1 3/4 cups. Reducing that with only half a cup of water gives a genuinely stiff compote, closer to a thick preserve than a sauce, which is what keeps it from bleeding up into the custard.
- PanA four-quart pan is most likely a wide, fairly shallow baking dish rather than a deep casserole. A 9x13 inch dish or a 10-inch round is about that capacity; depth is the enemy of even setting.
- "Bake as usual"No temperature is given here. For a custard, a modern equivalent is about 325F in a water bath, the pan set in a larger roasting tin with hot water halfway up the sides. Expect 45 to 60 minutes.
- DonenessPull it when the edges are set and the centre still wobbles as a single mass, about 170-175F on an instant-read thermometer. Baked to firm all the way through it will weep, and cooling drives the centre a few degrees further anyway.
- CoolingChill it thoroughly before serving. The compote layer is loose while warm and the portions will not lift neatly.
- ServingAn "ice-cream saucer" is the shallow footed dessert dish of the period; any small dessert bowl does. The recipe says only "a spoonful of cream" and does not specify whether it is whipped.
The American Pastry Cook belongs to the trade manuals written for hotel and restaurant kitchens rather than households, which explains the four-quart pan, the terse cross-reference to a custard already given, and the instruction on how to plate it in a glass saucer. The California in the title is doing real work: by the last quarter of the nineteenth century California orchards, the Santa Clara valley and the Sacramento delta among them, were shipping sweet cherries east by rail, and the pale Royal Ann became a California signature, later canned and brined in quantity for the maraschino trade. A baked custard over stewed fruit is much older than that, belonging to the same broad family as flan and clafoutis, but naming it for a state advertised where the fruit came from.