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Custard Flavored with Rum
Soak an ounce of gelatine in one pint of cold milk for fifteen minutes and then stir it over the fire until dissolved. Rub six ounces of loaf-sugar on the yellow rind of two lemons and put into the boiling milk. Beat the yolks of nine eggs in one pint of milk, pour it into the saucepan with the milk and gelatine, and stir the whole over the fire until on the point of boiling; then remove from the fire and continue stirring until nearly cold. If the custard is allowed to boil, the eggs will curdle. Mix in two wineglassfuls of rum when the custard is quite cold. Pour the custard into a mould which has been rinsed out with cold water, and pack in ice. Before serving, dip the mould into tepid water, turn the custard out onto a dish, and squeeze over the juice of a lemon, and serve.
A moulded rum custard in the Bavarian-cream family, set with gelatine rather than baked. The whole dish turns on the temperature at which you pull the custard off the heat.
- The hinge: never let it boilTake the custard off the heat when it thickens and coats the spoon, around 175-180F. Oscar's warning is literal: past about 185F the yolk proteins tighten and the custard breaks into grains that no amount of stirring will smooth.
- Gelatine quantityOne ounce is four 1/4-oz envelopes of modern powdered gelatine for one quart of milk, which is about the standard ratio for a custard that will turn out and hold its shape rather than stay spoonable. Three envelopes gives a softer set.
- Soaking the gelatineFifteen minutes in cold milk is the bloom. Sprinkle it over the surface rather than dumping it in a heap, or the centre stays dry and gritty.
- Loaf sugar and lemon rindLoaf sugar was hard refined sugar broken from a cone; rubbing the lumps against the lemon draws out the peel oil. Granulated sugar does not abrade the zest the same way — either rub the whole lemons with sugar cubes, or grate the zest and muddle it into six ounces (about 3/4 cup plus 2 tablespoons) of granulated sugar and let it stand while you work.
- WineglassfulIn this period a wineglass is roughly two fluid ounces, so two wineglassfuls is about half a cup of rum. Add it only when the custard is cold, as heat drives off the aroma the dish is named for.
- Packing in iceSubstitute the refrigerator: cover the filled mould and chill at least four to six hours, or overnight for a quart. Rinsing the mould with cold water first is not decorative — the film of water is what lets the custard release.
- Turning outA few seconds in tepid water, then invert onto a chilled plate. If it resists, return it to the water briefly rather than prying at the edges.
- YieldAbout five and a half to six cups of custard, filling a 1 1/2-quart mould and serving eight to ten. The lemon juice squeezed over at the table is the seasoning that keeps it from tasting merely sweet; do not skip it.
Oscar Tschirky, maitre d'hotel of the Waldorf and later the Waldorf-Astoria, published his cook book in 1896, and its dessert chapters lean heavily on the French repertoire that governed American hotel dining at the time. It is a rum-flavoured custard set with gelatine rather than baked — the technique that underlies Bavarian cream, though without the whipped cream a true bavarois would carry. The sugar-rubbed-on-peel step is older still: cooks used it long before zesters existed because the oil in citrus rind carries most of the flavour, and hard loaf sugar abrades it out of the peel. Rum was a familiar spirit in nineteenth-century American cookery.