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Plain Soft Custard
2 cups scalded milk
4 tablespoons sugar
2 whole eggs or 4 egg-yolks
½ teaspoon vanilla
⅛ teaspoon salt
Scald the milk in the top of the double boiler. Beat together slightly the eggs, sugar and salt. Add the hot milk to the egg mixture, mix thoroughly and return to the top of the double boiler. spoon.
Cook over hot water, stirring constantly until the egg coats the
A stirred custard sauce rather than a baked one — the text is cut off mid-sentence, but the missing words are the familiar test: cook until the mixture coats the back of the spoon.
- The hinge: temperatureStirred custard sets between about 170 and 180F and scrambles above roughly 185F. The spoon test works, but a thermometer works better; pull it the moment a drawn finger leaves a clean track on the coated spoon.
- Scalded milkScalding means heating to just below the boil, until bubbles ring the edge and steam rises — around 180F. It is often said to have been done to kill off souring organisms in unpasteurised milk; in practice here it mainly speeds the cooking and dissolves the sugar.
- TemperingAdding hot milk to the eggs rather than the reverse is the whole safeguard against curdling. Pour it in a thin stream, whisking, and add the first cup slowly.
- The double boilerThe water beneath should be hot but not at a rolling boil, and the bowl should not touch it. A heavy saucepan over low heat is faster and works if you stir without stopping and scrape the corners.
- Whole eggs or yolksFour yolks give a richer, smoother, more yellow sauce; two whole eggs set slightly firmer and a little more thinly flavoured. Yolks are the safer choice for a beginner, as whites coagulate at a lower temperature and show up as threads.
- Add the vanilla off the heatThe recipe lists it with the ingredients, but stir it in after the custard is cooked and pulled from the heat. Prolonged heat drives off the aromatics.
- If it curdlesStrain it at once through a fine sieve into a cold bowl, or blitz it briefly with a stick blender. A light curdle is recoverable; a fully scrambled one is not.
- Yield and servingAbout two cups, enough to sauce four to six servings of steamed pudding, fruit or cake. Cool with a sheet of plastic on the surface to stop a skin forming, and keep refrigerated no more than two days.
Plain soft custard is the English pouring custard — the same thing French kitchens call crème anglaise — and in an early twentieth-century American household book it functions as a sauce, not a dessert in itself. Books of this era are often said to have treated custard as a foundation skill: the same three or four ingredients, varied in proportion and method, produce the soft custard here, a baked cup custard, an ice-cream base and the filling for a cream pie. The Butterick books were published by the pattern company as part of a broad line of domestic manuals aimed at the home dressmaker and housekeeper, and the terse, formula-like layout — ingredients stacked at the top, method in a short paragraph — reflects the domestic-science movement then reshaping American cookbooks, with its measured cups and spoons in place of the older handfuls and wineglassfuls.