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Sonoma Grape Custard
Make a corn starch custard as directed for baking with pineapples and when ready for the oven mix in a quart or more of white muscat grapes, washed but not previously cooked. Bake as usual. Serve cold.
Bartlett pears quite ripe can be used in the same way as white grapes. Apples should be cooked as directed for red cherries.
This is a variation entry rather than a standalone formula: it assumes you already have the book's baked cornstarch custard for pineapple in front of you. A few points on scaling it up and on the fruit itself.
- The base custardThe book does not repeat the cornstarch custard it sends you to, so its proportions are unknown from this page alone. A workable modern stand-in is about 1 quart milk, 3-4 tablespoons cornstarch slaked in cold milk, 4 eggs and 3/4 cup sugar, scalded together until it thickens, then poured into the dish and set in the oven. The cornstarch presumably helps keep the custard from weeping around wet fruit.
- A quart of grapesBy volume, a quart of loose grapes is about 1 1/2 lb, which is a generous amount of fruit for a quart of custard. Stem them and dry them well; surface water thins the top of the custard.
- Muscat grapes then and nowThe white muscats grown in California in this period were seeded, thick-skinned wine and table grapes; Muscat of Alexandria was among the most widely planted. Modern seedless muscat varieties are milder but work directly; if you use a seeded muscat, halve and pit them or warn whoever is eating.
- OvenThe recipe says only 'bake as usual' and gives no temperature. For a modern oven, 325-350F suits a custard: higher than that and the eggs curdle around the fruit before the centre sets. A water bath is worth the trouble in a deep dish.
- DonenessThe custard is done when the outer two inches are set and the centre still trembles as a single mass; it firms as it cools, so pull it early.
- Serve cold means chilled throughGive it at least four hours in the refrigerator. Warm, the cornstarch reads as gluey; cold, it slices.
- The pear and apple variantsBartlett pears should be peeled, cored and sliced thin enough to cook through in the same time as the custard. Apples will not do that raw, and the contrast with the grapes being used 'not previously cooked' suggests the red cherry method the author points to involves softening the fruit first.
- YieldA quart of custard plus a quart of fruit fills a 2 1/2 to 3 quart baking dish and serves eight to ten.
The American Pastry Cook belongs to the run of trade manuals Jessup Whitehead wrote for hotel and restaurant kitchens in Chicago in the 1880s and 1890s, and its recipes are written cook-to-cook, in shorthand, with cross-references instead of repetition. The Sonoma name here is a piece of commercial geography: by the time this book appeared, refrigerated rail cars were moving California table grapes east in quantity, and a California place-name on a menu carried the appeal of something a hotel pastry department could put on a menu by name. Cornstarch, likewise, was an industrial product that had been made commercially since the 1840s and spread gradually through American kitchens as it grew cheaper and more reliable, and pastry cooks used it exactly as it is used here, as insurance against a juicy fruit breaking a custard. The entry is less a dish than a template, which is why it ends by telling you what else to put in it.