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Custard Pudding
One and one-half pints of milk, four eggs, one cup of sugar, two teaspoons Vanilla, pinch of salt. Beat eggs and sugar together; dilute with milk and extract; pour into buttered pudding dish, set in oven in dipping-pan two-thirds full of boiling water; bake until firm, thirty-five to forty minutes in moderate oven.
A plain baked custard, and the only real skill in it is heat control. The recipe's own instructions — water bath, moderate oven — are the whole technique.
- Moderate ovenRead this as 325–350F. Custard sets at around 175–180F internally; a hotter oven drives the eggs past that before the centre catches up, and you get curds and weeping.
- Quantities in modern termsOne and a half pints is 3 cups of milk. Four eggs plus 3 cups milk is a soft, spoonable custard rather than a sliceable one; whole milk gives the best body.
- The dipping-pan"Dipping-pan" is generally taken to mean a dripping or roasting pan. Filling it two-thirds full of already-boiling water, as the recipe directs, matters: cold water in the bath delays setting, so the top overcooks while the middle stays liquid.
- Don't beat air in"Beat eggs and sugar together" means combined and smooth, not foamy. Whipped-in air rises and leaves a spongy, pitted surface. Straining the mixture through a sieve before it goes into the dish removes stray bits of white.
- SugarA full cup is sweet by current taste for this quantity of milk; two-thirds of a cup gives a custard that tastes of egg and vanilla rather than syrup.
- Testing for done"Bake until firm" is misleading. Pull it when the edges are set and the centre still wobbles as a mass — the recipe's thirty-five to forty minutes, varying with the depth of the dish. It firms as it cools, and a fully firm centre in the oven means it is already overdone.
- Yield and servingServes about six. Good warm or thoroughly chilled; a grating of nutmeg over the top before baking is a common finish on custards of this period.
Baked custard of this kind — eggs, milk, sugar, a flavouring, set gently in a water bath — is among the oldest sweet dishes in the English-language repertoire, and was long treated as standard beginner's work. It teaches the behaviour of eggs in liquid, the same lesson that underlies pie fillings, ice cream bases and savoury timbales. The bottled vanilla extract is the modern touch: commercial extracts became widely available and affordable in American kitchens over the second half of the 1800s, and a recipe calling for two teaspoons of it, with no rosewater, nutmeg or bay leaf in sight, sits on the later side of that shift.