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Boiled Custard Sauce
Use recipe for Boiled Custard (See Puddings) and thin with a little rich milk or cream.
This is a cross-reference rather than a standalone formula: it assumes you have already made the book's Boiled Custard and simply want it loose enough to pour. A few notes on what that base actually requires.
- "Boiled" is a misnomerA boiled custard of this period is a stirred stovetop custard, usually cooked over hot water and never allowed to reach a boil. Much above 180F the egg proteins tighten and the sauce curdles; take it off the heat when it coats the spoon, around 170-175F.
- The base, in modern proportionsBoiled custards of this kind are typically built on several eggs or yolks and a few spoonfuls of sugar per pint of milk, though proportions vary a good deal from book to book. A leaner custard may already be thin enough to pour, so taste and judge before adding liquid.
- "Rich milk"This means milk that has not been skimmed, with its cream still in it — closest today to whole milk with a splash of cream, or half-and-half. Ordinary whole milk works; skim will thin the sauce out of proportion to its flavor.
- How much to addStart with 2 tablespoons of milk or cream per cup of custard and stop when it ribbons off the spoon rather than mounding. Add it after the custard has cooled slightly, off the heat, or you risk re-heating the eggs.
- Strain and coolPour the finished custard through a fine sieve to catch any set threads of egg, then cool it with the surface covered if you dislike a skin. Chilled sauce thickens noticeably, so judge the consistency cold if you plan to serve it cold.
- Yield and servingA pint of thinned custard sauces eight to ten portions of steamed pudding, baked apples or fruit. Serve it warm over hot puddings, cold over fruit and cake.
Boiled custard was a standard sweet sauce of the English and American kitchen for generations, the same mixture that appears elsewhere as "pouring custard" and, in French kitchens, as crème anglaise — "English cream," a name usually taken as a nod to the sauce's association with English cookery, though that reading is traditional rather than documented. Its presence here as a one-line entry says something about how the book is organized: the reader is assumed to own the whole volume and to turn to the pudding chapter, so the sauce section can compress an entry into a cross-reference rather than repeat a formula every cook was expected to know already.