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Custard, Baked
Take the same ingredients as for boiled custard. Scald the milk, and pour over the beaten eggs, sugar and salt, pour into a pudding dish or individual dishes and bake very slowly in a second pan with water in it until firm. Quick cooking ruins this pudding.
A plain baked custard, written for a cook who already knows the boiled version a page or two earlier. Everything hinges on the low heat: custard is a set, not a cooked-through solid, and it curdles at a temperature only a little above the one that sets it.
- The missing ingredient listThe recipe borrows its proportions from the boiled custard and gives none of its own. A typical baked custard of the period runs about 1 pint (2 cups) milk, 3 to 4 eggs, 1/4 cup sugar and a pinch of salt, often with vanilla or grated nutmeg, though this page specifies none of it. Four eggs to the pint gives a firmer set that unmolds; three gives a softer spoonable one.
- "Very slowly"In a modern oven this translates to roughly 300 to 325F; the book gives no temperature. Hotter than that and the egg protein tightens and the water in the custard steams, which is what makes a baked custard weep, pit, or separate into curds and whey.
- The second pan with waterThis is a bain-marie. Set the dish or ramekins in a roasting pan and pour in hot water to reach halfway up their sides. The water buffers the heat and keeps the outer edge from setting long before the center does.
- Scalding, and why it still helpsHeat the milk to about 180F, until it steams and shows bubbles at the rim. It shortens the baking time and dissolves the sugar; pour it into the eggs in a thin stream while whisking or you will make sweet scrambled egg.
- Timing and donenessIndividual dishes take 25 to 35 minutes, a single pudding dish 45 to 60. It is done when a knife inserted an inch from the edge comes out clean and the center still trembles; the residual heat finishes it. An instant-read thermometer should show 170 to 175F at the center.
- Strain the mixtureNot in the original, but worth doing. Pouring the custard through a fine sieve into the baking dish catches bits of coagulated white and the chalazae, and gives a smooth surface.
- YieldA pint of milk with eggs and sugar fills four to six ramekins and serves that many. Serve warm or thoroughly chilled; a lukewarm custard tastes of nothing much.
Baked custard belongs to the oldest layer of English sweet cookery: eggs and milk set by gentle heat, the same mixture that fills a medieval "crustade" or open tart, from which the word custard descends. By the time the Butterick Publishing Company issued its cook book in the first decade or so of the twentieth century, custard had become a fixture of American home and invalid cookery alike, cheap, digestible, and made from what a household already had on hand. Its placement among the puddings is telling, as is the terse cross-reference to the boiled version: the two were understood as one preparation finished two ways, on the range in a double boiler or in the oven in a pan of water. The closing warning that "quick cooking ruins this pudding" is the whole lesson of egg cookery in a single line, and it was worth printing because coal and wood ranges made a steady low oven the hardest thing in the kitchen to achieve.