Home › The Belgian Kitchen › Quince Custard
Quince Custard
When you have quince preserves by you this is a quickly prepared dish. Make a good custard with a pint of rich milk, four eggs and a little essence of almonds and two ounces of powdered sugar. Put your quince preserve at the bottom of a fireproof circular dish and fill up with custard. Put it to bake for half or hour or till set. When set add some more quince (heated) on the top with some chopped almonds and serve hot. The same dish can be done with apples, which should be stewed, flavored with the rind of a half lemon, and passed through a sieve. Apple puree is put on the top in the same way, and it is decorated with some thin lemon peel cut into stars.
A baked custard over a layer of quince preserve, of the sort that assumes a well-stocked preserve cupboard. The custard is the only tricky part, and the original oven instruction needs adjusting.
- TemperatureNo heat is given. Bake an egg custard at 325F; anything hotter curdles the eggs and weeps liquid into the preserve. A water bath is worth the trouble here, since the dish is filled to the top with unthickened custard.
- "Till set"Half an hour is optimistic for a full pint of custard in a deep dish. Judge by the centre: it should wobble as a unit and read about 170-175F. Carryover heat finishes it, so pull it before the middle looks firm.
- The pintA British book of 1915 means a 20 fl oz imperial pint, so measure 2 1/2 US cups of milk rather than 2. With four eggs to that quantity the custard is on the soft side, which is intended.
- Rich milkThe recipe asks for milk better than plain. Half whole milk and half single cream, or whole milk with an extra yolk, gets closer.
- SugarTwo ounces of powdered (that is, finely milled) sugar is about 1/4 cup. The preserve carries most of the sweetness, so do not increase it.
- Essence of almondsPeriod almond essence was often bitter-almond based and very strong. Modern almond extract is intense in its own right: 1/4 teaspoon for the whole pint, no more.
- Fireproof circular dishAn ovenproof earthenware or glass dish, not a metal mould and not a modern lidded casserole. It has to hold the pint of custard as well as the preserve beneath it, so err on the larger side.
- The apple variationStewed apple sieved to a puree is thin compared with quince preserve, so cook it down until it mounds on a spoon before it goes in the base, or it will thin the custard from below.
- YieldServes four to six as written, and the recipe directs that it be served hot, with the warmed preserve on top.
The Belgian Cook Book was compiled in Britain in 1915 from recipes collected from Belgian refugees who had fled the German occupation, its sales going to relief work; the plain, thrifty character of many of the recipes reflects both the domestic cooking of Flanders and Wallonia and the straitened circumstances of the people dictating them. Quince suits that context well: the fruit is hard and astringent, and is rarely eaten raw, so it is generally converted into long-keeping preserves and pastes, and a jar of it in the cupboard was exactly the sort of standing resource that let a cook produce a hot pudding at short notice. Quince, almond and lemon are a long-established pairing in northern and western Europe, and building a sweet on top of preserves already made, rather than starting from fresh fruit, is characteristic of household cookery in a season when fresh fruit was not to be had.