Home › Cold Desserts › Caramel Custard
Caramel Custard
4 cups scalded milk 5 eggs 1/2 teaspoon salt 1 teaspoon vanilla 1/2 cup sugar Put sugar in omelet pan, stir constantly over hot part of range until melted to a syrup of light brown color. Add gradually to milk, being careful that milk does not bubble up and go over, as is liable on account of high temperature of sugar. As soon as sugar is melted in milk, add mixture gradually to eggs slightly beaten; add salt and flavoring, then strain in buttered mould. Bake as custard. Chill, and serve with Caramel Sauce. ½ cup sugar ½ cup boiling water
A baked custard in which the caramel is dissolved into the milk rather than poured into the mould, so the whole thing comes out coffee-coloured rather than sauced from below. Two lines carry all the risk: melting the sugar dry, and the phrase "bake as custard."
- "Bake as custard" means a water bathElsewhere the book directs setting the buttered mould in a pan of hot water and baking in a slow oven. No numerical temperature is given; a slow oven is usually rendered today as around 325F. Reckon 45 to 60 minutes for a single large mould, 25 to 35 for individual cups. It is done when a knife slipped in an inch from the edge comes out clean and the centre still trembles; an instant-read thermometer should show 170-175F. Past that the custard weeps.
- The omelet panA shallow, heavy iron skillet. Any heavy-bottomed pan works. "The hot part of the range" is the spot directly over the firebox on a wood or coal stove, i.e. your highest reliable burner heat; sugar melted dry needs steady moderate-to-high heat and constant stirring.
- Adding caramel to milkThe warning is worth heeding. Molten sugar is above 300F and the milk will boil up violently. Pour the caramel into the milk in a thin stream off the heat, in a pan with plenty of headroom, and expect it to seize into hard lumps at first; keep it warm and stir until they dissolve.
- Scalded milkHeated to about 180F, until a ring of bubbles forms at the edge. Combine it with the eggs gradually and while stirring, or you will have sweet scrambled egg. Straining afterwards catches whatever did set.
- Egg sizeEggs of the period were not graded and varied a good deal, so five may not equal five of today's large. Five eggs in four cups of milk gives a soft, spoonable set; if you want it firm enough to unmould, use six.
- The caramel sauce figuresThe trailing half cup sugar and half cup boiling water belong to the Caramel Sauce, not to the custard. The two are equal parts: brown the sugar dry, dissolve it in the boiling water, and boil to a syrup, reducing to the thickness you want.
- YieldFour cups of milk plus eggs makes roughly 5 cups of custard, enough for eight servings. Chill several hours before serving; it improves overnight.
Caramel custard appears in Fannie Farmer's 1896 book as one of a long run of variations on plain baked custard, which was the workhorse invalid-and-nursery dish of nineteenth-century American cooking: cheap, filling, and made from what a household with a cow or a milkman already had. What distinguishes this version is that the burnt sugar is carried into the custard itself rather than lining the mould, which is what separates it from the Spanish and French flan and crème renversée traditions that eventually became the more familiar form in the United States. Dry-melting sugar for colour and flavour was standard technique of the period, used as much for browning gravies and darkening cakes as for sweets, and "caramel" in these books often means the burnt-sugar syrup itself rather than the chewy confection the word now suggests.