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Custard Sauce--Plain
1 quart of rich milk. 1/2 pound of sugar. 8, 10, or 12 yolks of eggs. Flavor to suit, or wine.
Boil the milk with the sugar in it. Beat the yolks light with a little milk mixed in. Turn them quickly into the boiling milk and in about one minute or just before it begins to boil take off and strain it. The best sauce when ice-cold for snow eggs, lemon snow float, fruit floats and gipsy pudding.
A crème anglaise by another name, written for a cook who already knew the danger point. The whole recipe turns on the twenty seconds after the yolks go into the milk.
- The hinge: pull it before it boilsEgg yolks set at about 180F and curdle not far above. Stir constantly once the yolks go in and take the pan off the heat the moment the sauce coats a spoon and holds a drawn line — the surface will steam and the foam will thin, but no bubble should break. Straining immediately into a cold bowl stops the carryover cooking.
- Adding yolks to boiling milkThe instruction to turn the yolks straight into boiling milk is safest if the pan comes off the flame first and the mixture is whisked hard. Modern practice is to temper: whisk a cup of the hot milk into the yolks, then return everything to the pan over low heat. Same result, less risk of scrambled threads.
- "Rich milk"Milk of the period was unhomogenised, and "rich" here most likely means unskimmed, with the cream still in it. Whole milk with a quarter of it replaced by heavy cream gets close; all whole milk gives a thinner sauce that still works.
- 1/2 pound of sugarAbout one cup plus two tablespoons of granulated sugar. That is a sweet sauce by current taste — for a dessert that is already sweetened, two-thirds of it is plenty.
- Eight, ten or twelve yolksThe range is the thickness dial. Eight yolks to the quart gives a pouring sauce for floats; twelve gives a noticeably thicker, more clinging custard. Whites left over would go to the snow eggs and floats the recipe names.
- FlavoringVanilla is the default: split a bean into the milk as it heats and leave it to infuse off the heat, or stir extract in after straining so the alcohol does not cook off. If using wine — sherry or Madeira would be typical period choices — add it cold, at the end, or it will thin the sauce and encourage curdling.
- Cooling and keepingStrain into a bowl set over ice, stir until the steam stops, then press plastic film to the surface to stop a skin forming. Chill at least four hours; it is meant to be served ice-cold. Keeps three days refrigerated, no longer.
- YieldRoughly five cups, enough sauce for ten to twelve desserts.
This is crème anglaise, the plainest and most useful of the egg-thickened sauces, here given without ceremony under its workaday American name. Jessup Whitehead's recipe is scaled to a quart, measures its sugar by weight, and closes with a list of the four things it is poured over rather than any note on technique — an omission that suggests a reader already familiar with the method. The desserts named are the standard repertoire of the period: snow eggs are œufs à la neige, meringue poached in milk and floated on the custard, and the various "floats" are the same principle with fruit purée or whipped whites. The economy is neat and characteristic of professional kitchens: the whites build the dessert, the yolks build the sauce it sits in, and nothing from the egg crate is wasted.