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Custard Sauce (Scald pint milk in double)
Scald 1 pint milk in double boiler.
Dissolve 3/4 tablespoonful cornstarch and add to milk; cook about 10 minutes.
Beat yolks 2 eggs slightly, add 1/4 cup sugar, ½ teaspoonful salt, dilute 2 tablespoonsful thickened milk, pour into boiler, let cook at lower temperature until eggs are thickened. Remove from fire, add 1 teaspoonful butter and 1/2 teaspoonful vanilla. Beat well and cool quickly. Serve cold.
A stirred custard stabilised with a little cornstarch, which makes it far more forgiving than a plain crème anglaise. The whole job is temperature control at the end.
- The hinge: keep it below a simmerOnce the tempered yolks go in, the custard needs to reach about 175-180F and no more. The cornstarch buys you some insurance against curdling, but water at a rolling boil under the top pan will still scramble the yolks around the edges.
- "Dilute 2 tablespoonsful thickened milk"This means stir two tablespoons of the hot cornstarch-thickened milk into the yolk-sugar mixture to temper it before returning everything to the boiler. It is not a separate ingredient.
- The salt looks wrongHalf a teaspoon of salt in a pint of dessert sauce is aggressive by modern palates and may be a typesetting slip for an eighth. You may prefer 1/8 to 1/4 teaspoon.
- Cornstarch measureThree-quarters of a tablespoon is a little over two teaspoons. Slurry it with a few tablespoons of cold milk before adding, or it will lump in the scalded milk.
- ScaldingBring the milk to roughly 180F, when it steams and shows bubbles at the rim. Whole milk gives the body the recipe assumes; skim will taste thin.
- "Cool quickly"Strain into a cold bowl and set it in ice water, stirring now and then. This stops carryover cooking and keeps the sauce out of the range where dairy spoils. Press a film against the surface if you dislike skin.
- YieldAbout two cups, enough sauce for six to eight servings of steamed pudding, baked apples or plain cake.
Custard sauce is the workhorse of the nineteenth- and early twentieth-century pudding chapter: almost every steamed, boiled or baked pudding in a book like this one expects a jug of something poured over it, and this is the plain sweet version against which hard sauce and foamy sauce were the richer alternatives. The addition of cornstarch suggests a domestic rather than a professional recipe, intended to be reliable on a coal or early gas range where fine heat control was uncertain; the starch raises the temperature at which the egg proteins curdle and lets an inexperienced cook get away with a moment's inattention.