Home › Puddings and Pudding Sauces › Custard Sauce (Scald one pint milk in double)
Custard Sauce (Scald one pint milk in double)
Scald one pint milk in double boiler.
Dissolve three-quarters tablespoonful corn starch and add to milk, cook about ten minutes. Beat yolks two eggs slightly, add one-quarter cup sugar, oneeighth teaspoonful salt, dilute two tablespoonfuls thickened milk, pour into boiler, let cook at lower temperature until eggs are thickened. Remove from fire, add one teaspoonful butter and onehalf teaspoonful vanilla. Beat well and cool quickly. Serve cold.
A stirred custard sauce stabilized with a little cornstarch, which makes it far more forgiving than a pure crème anglaise. The original assumes a double boiler and gives no yield.
- The hingeOnce the yolks go in, keep the water beneath at a bare simmer and stir constantly. The sauce is done when it coats the back of a spoon and holds a line drawn through it — roughly 175-180F. The small amount of cornstarch buys some margin, but pushed much past that the yolks can still curdle.
- "Dilute two tablespoonfuls thickened milk"This means temper: whisk two tablespoons of the hot cornstarch-thickened milk into the yolk-sugar mixture before returning it to the pan. It is the step that prevents scrambled egg, and the wording obscures it.
- Three-quarters tablespoonfulAbout 2¼ teaspoons of cornstarch, or roughly 7 grams. Measure it level; a heaped spoonful pushes the sauce toward pudding.
- Cook the starch outThe ten minutes of cooking before the eggs go in is not padding. Cornstarch needs sustained heat to lose its raw, chalky taste, and a double boiler heats slowly.
- Cool quicklyStrain through a fine sieve into a cold bowl, then set that bowl in ice water and stir. This stops residual cooking and breaks up any bits of set egg. A skin will form unless you press plastic wrap onto the surface.
- Vanilla and butterBoth go in off the heat so the volatile flavor is not driven off. Use extract, not vanilla sugar; the teaspoon of butter is there for gloss and mouthfeel and is worth keeping.
- Yield and servingAbout two and a half cups — enough for six to eight servings poured over steamed pudding, baked apples, gingerbread or fruit. Keeps two to three days covered in the refrigerator; whisk before serving.
Custard sauce is the plain English cousin of French crème anglaise, and one sauce, learned once, dressed a dozen different puddings and rescued a dry cake. The cornstarch is the American touch. Cornstarch was manufactured commercially in the United States from the 1840s and was gradually adopted into home pantries over the decades that followed, and cookery writers of the period are often said to have added a little of it to egg custards precisely because it insures the sauce against curdling — a real concern for a cook working over a coal or wood range with no thermometer and uneven heat. Books aimed at new housekeepers leaned hard on such safeguards; the double boiler, likewise, is generally thought to have been common equipment in this era, doing the work of the modern low burner.