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To Make Custard
1074. Set a saucepan of water to boil, and, while it boils, put all CUSTARDS. the ingredients for the custard into a jug; viz., a pint of thin cream, five yolks of eggs well beaten (no white), sugar and laurel leaf to the taste. Set the jug in boiling water, and keep stirring till it is the proper thickness. Then take it out, and stuff a clean cloth into the jug to prevent its skinning over, and let it stand till quite cold, and then add some brandy. If in a hurry, the cream and laurel leaves may be made warm before adding the sugar and eggs, but the custard is not quite so thick in this case. 1075. Boiled Milk Custard should be made with four eggs to a quart of new milk; flavour with sugar and nutmeg, if liked; pour it boiling over some thin slices of roll or cake, and eat it either hot or cold. 1076. A Less Rich Custard. - Mix a quarter of a pint of cream with a quarter of a pint of milk, leaving a little out to mix with a teaspoonful of arrowroot; pour the other boiled and sweetened over it; and add the yolks of two eggs and a little brandy when cold.
Three custards under one heading: a rich boiled cream custard, a plain milk custard poured over cake, and an arrowroot-thickened economy version. The first cannot be made as printed.
- The laurel leaf is the problemIn nineteenth-century British cookery "laurel" in a sweet dish means cherry laurel, Prunus laurocerasus, whose leaves were steeped in cream for an almond flavour. Crushed or heated in liquid, the leaves release hydrogen cyanide; the dose from a leaf or two in a pint of cream is unpredictable and infusions of it caused documented poisonings and deaths in this period. There is no reliable way to judge "to the taste" against a toxic ingredient, so recipe 1074 should not be attempted. Use a current custard recipe and flavour it with vanilla or almond extract.
- Not the same as bayThe bay leaf sold today, Laurus nobilis, is a different plant and is not what is meant here. The substitution is not a rescue for this recipe either, since bay gives a savoury note rather than the almond character the original was after.
- Recipes 1075 and 1076Neither of the two later custards calls for laurel; the objection above applies only to the first. Both are conventional egg custards of a kind still made.
- Imperial measuresThis is a British book, so a pint is 20 fluid ounces, about 2.5 US cups, and a quart is 40 fluid ounces. Four eggs to an imperial quart of milk is a notably thin custard by modern standards, closer to a pouring sauce than a set one.
- Egg richnessFive yolks to an imperial pint of cream, with no whites, gives a heavy pouring custard rather than one that will set. Whites make a baked custard firmer; a yolk-only mixture stirred over water as here thickens but stays fluid.
- Why the jug stands in waterThe jug-in-a-saucepan arrangement is an improvised double boiler. Egg yolks curdle above roughly 180F, so indirect heat and constant stirring are the whole technique; a custard thickened this way is done when it coats a spoon.
- The cloth in the jugStuffing a cloth into the jug mouth was meant to trap steam and stop a skin forming on the surface. A round of baking parchment or plastic film pressed onto the custard does the same job without introducing laundry to the food.
- Brandy at the endThe brandy goes in cold in both the first and third recipes, and for good reason: added to hot custard the alcohol flashes off and the flavour goes with it.
- YieldAn imperial pint of custard serves six to eight as a sauce over pudding or fruit, rather fewer if it is eaten from a glass.
Cherry laurel was one of the standard cheap flavourings of the Georgian and Victorian still-room, valued because its leaves carry the same bitter-almond note as bitter almonds and peach kernels, and for the same chemical reason. Recipes calling for a "laurel leaf" in cream or custard appear in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century English cookery, and so do warnings: the danger of laurel-water was discussed in medical writing of the period after a notorious poisoning case, yet the leaves stayed in domestic use long enough to reach print in books like this one. The three graded custards here are also a good picture of Victorian household economy, running from a pint of thin cream and five yolks down to a version stretched with milk and a teaspoonful of arrowroot. Pouring boiling custard over slices of roll or cake, as in the second, was one way of using up bread and turning it into a dish worth putting on the table.