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Caramel Custard
Six heaping tablespoonfuls of Blanchard Evaporated Eggs dissolved in three-quarters cup of milk, one-half cupful of sugar, one quart of milk, half teaspoonful of salt.
Put the milk on to boil with the exception of one cupful. Beat the eggs thoroughly and add the cup of cold milk to them.
Stir the sugar in a small frying pan until For further information address it becomes liquid and just begins to smoke.
Stir it into the boiling milk; then add the beaten eggs and cold milk and stir constantly until the mixture begins to thicken. Set away to cool. Serve in glasses.
This is a stirred stovetop custard, not a baked one — the eggs never see the oven, and the whole thing is set to cool and spooned into glasses. Two things need translating: the egg product, and the caramel.
- Blanchard Evaporated EggsA commercial dried whole-egg powder, sold to households in the early 1900s and now essentially gone from grocery shelves. Six heaping tablespoons reconstituted in three-quarters cup of milk is roughly six eggs' worth, but "heaping" makes this genuinely imprecise; whole dried egg powder is still sold for baking if you want to follow the original, and six large eggs beaten with three-quarters cup of cold milk is the practical equivalent.
- The stray line of type"For further information address" in the middle of the caramel sentence is a printer's intrusion from an advertisement, not an instruction. Read the sentence straight through: stir the sugar until it liquefies and just begins to smoke.
- The hinge: caramel into hot milkDry caramel hitting boiling milk erupts violently and can seize into a lump. Pour it in slowly down the side of the pan, off the heat for a moment, and keep stirring until it dissolves before returning to the boil. Sugar that has gone past "just begins to smoke" is bitter and cannot be rescued.
- How far to cook it"Until the mixture begins to thicken" means about 175–180F on a thermometer — thick enough to coat a spoon, no more. This is a pouring custard; it will not set firm like a baked one, and pushing it further curdles the egg.
- Temper the eggsThe recipe has you add the cold egg-and-milk mixture to three cups of boiling milk (the quart less the reserved cupful). Ladle a cup of the hot milk into the eggs first and whisk, then return everything to the pan. The original method works only with constant, vigorous stirring.
- A quart pan is not enoughThe finished mixture comes to about four and three-quarter cups of liquid, and milk foams as it boils. Use a heavy saucepan of at least three quarts, and a separate small skillet for the sugar as directed.
- Yield and servingAbout six servings in small glasses or custard cups. Cover the surface while cooling to keep a skin from forming, and chill thoroughly — it is served cold.
The Bride's Cook Book belongs to a genre of promotional cookery that flourished around 1900: volumes assembled or subsidized by manufacturers, with the sponsor's product written directly into the instructions. Evaporated and desiccated eggs were one of the era's proud conveniences, dried whole egg sold in tins to households that had no reliable winter egg supply and no refrigeration, and recipes like this one exist partly to prove the powder could stand in for the shell egg in a delicate custard. The dish itself is the caramel-flavoured crème familiar from nineteenth-century cookery — sugar cooked dry to a caramel, dissolved in scalded milk, thickened with egg — differing from a baked crème caramel, where the caramel lines the mould, in that it is stirred on the range and served loose in glasses rather than turned out.