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Baked Custard
Boil a handful of peach-leaves with one quart of milk; when the milk is cold strain it and mix in a quarter of a pound of caster-sugar; then stir in gradually eight eggs beaten very light. Pour the custard in a buttered pie-dish, grate nutmeg on the top and bake for half an hour in a moderate oven. It may be served hot or cold.
The custard base here is unremarkable, but the flavouring is not: the peach leaves steeped in the milk are the problem, and there is no safe way to scale a "handful."
- Why the peach leaves failPeach leaves contain cyanogenic glycosides (chiefly prunasin, a relative of the amygdalin in bitter almonds). When the leaves are crushed and wetted, plant enzymes release hydrogen cyanide. This is the same chemistry that made bitter almond and laurel-leaf flavourings popular in the nineteenth century and then got them removed from the kitchen.
- The dose is unknowable"A handful" of leaves gives no weight, and the glycoside content of peach foliage varies with the age of the leaf, the cultivar and the season. Heating both drives off volatile hydrogen cyanide and destroys the enzymes that release it, so what ends up in a quart of milk cannot be reasoned about from the instruction as written.
- Not a matter of techniqueNothing in the baking corrects the infusion. The custard is set in a moderate oven and served hot or cold; the flavouring compounds have already gone into the milk before any heat is applied to the finished dish.
- If you want the flavourThe almond-and-stone-fruit note being aimed at here is what commercial almond extract supplies. Use a current baked-custard recipe with extract, and leave the leaves out entirely.
- Reading the rest of the pageCaster sugar is simply fine-grained white sugar, and a quart of milk to eight eggs is a rich, firm custard by modern standards; many present-day baked custards use four to six eggs to the same quantity of milk. Neither point makes the recipe usable as written.
Flavouring milk and cream with peach or laurel leaves was standard practice in English and American kitchens from the eighteenth century into the late nineteenth, and it turns up in Rundell and Leslie as casually as vanilla does now: the leaves gave custards, blancmanges and ice creams a bitter-almond perfume at no cost, from a tree already in the garden. The same instinct explains cherry-laurel water and the heavy use of bitter almonds in Victorian confectionery. That the flavour and the poison came from the same chemistry was understood in outline by the late eighteenth century — cases of poisoning from laurel water were documented — but the leaves lingered in print long after chemists had raised the alarm, which is roughly why this entry sits in a 1896 hotel cookbook without comment. Oscar Tschirky's book gathers a great deal of older domestic material alongside genuine Waldorf service recipes.