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Plain Baked Custard
2 quarts of milk or cream. 1/2 pound of sugar. 24 yolks of eggs, or 16 whole. 2 tablespoonfuls of vanilla or lemon.
Beat the sugar and eggs together; pour in the milk and extract. Bake in a shallow pan about twenty or thirty minutes.
The preceding is everybody's acquaintance and for a cold pudding is excellent without sauce or any other addition. When it turns watery it is because of too much baking. But when it is desired to add to it some of our abundant fruits, which would harmonize with it so well an unpleasant state of fluidity results in spite of careful baking. Then the cooks say it is the fault of water in the milk, and blame the cows for going and standing in the river, as they are known to do, soaking themselves through and through for hours at a time. The difficulty can be overcome and a nice line of fruit eustards made in the following way.
This is a hotel-scale baked custard: two quarts of milk and up to two dozen yolks. Everything about handling it follows from one fact — egg custard sets at about 175F and curdles not much above that.
- Scale it downAs written this fills a large shallow pan and serves sixteen or more. A quarter batch — 2 cups milk, 2 oz (about 1/4 cup) sugar, 6 yolks or 4 whole eggs, 1 1/2 teaspoons extract — behaves identically.
- Eggs were smallerEggs were probably smaller -- Nineteenth-century eggs are generally reckoned to have run smaller than today's large. If you use large eggs, you may want 20 yolks or 14 whole for the full recipe rather than 24 and 16.
- Oven temperatureThe recipe names no oven heat. Bake it moderate, 325-350F: higher than that and the outside overcooks before the centre sets, which is precisely the weeping the author complains about.
- Use a water bathThe recipe says only "shallow pan" and gives no further direction. Set your dish in a roasting pan filled with hot water halfway up the sides; it buffers the custard against direct heat.
- Judge by the wobble, not the clockTwenty to thirty minutes suits a thin layer in a wide pan. Pull the custard when the edges are set and the centre still trembles as a unit — about 170-175F on an instant-read thermometer. It firms as it cools.
- Why it turns wateryThe author is right that overbaking causes it, though the mechanism is curdling: the egg proteins tighten and squeeze out the liquid they were holding. Once it has broken there is no fixing it.
- The fruit problemFresh fruit adds its own juice and acid, both of which loosen a set custard. Raw pineapple, papaya, kiwi and figs also contain enzymes that attack egg protein, though baking heat largely destroys them; the trouble shows most when such fruit is added raw to a finished custard. Cook or drain fruit before adding it, or spoon it over the finished custard.
- ServingBest cold, as the author says, straight from the pan. Chill at least four hours; refrigerate leftovers and eat within two days.
The American Pastry Cook belongs to the run of manuals Jessup Whitehead wrote in the 1880s and 1890s for cooks in American hotels, restaurants and steamboats rather than for housekeepers — which is why the ingredient list opens at two quarts of milk and two dozen yolks. The dish itself is older than the book, and Whitehead's tone acknowledges as much when he calls it "everybody's acquaintance." The digression about cows standing in the river is a joke at the expense of a real grievance: watered milk was a common enough fraud that cooks had a ready excuse for any custard that failed to set, and Babcock's butterfat test, introduced in 1890, only came into general use over the following decade.