Home › The Waldorf Kitchen › Vanilla Cup Custards
Vanilla Cup Custards
Pound a vanilla bean in a mortar, stir in three pints of milk, eight well-beaten eggs and sufficient crushed loaf sugar to sweeten; with this fill up some cups, place them in a pan of hot water, set them in the oven and cook. Turn the custards out when done, and serve them either hot or cold.
A plain baked custard of the old proportion — roughly one egg to each cup of milk — with no thickener but the eggs themselves. The whole thing hinges on gentle heat.
- Oven temperatureNo temperature is given; the recipe only says to set them in the oven and cook. Bake at about 325F; much above 350F and the custard is apt to curdle into a weeping, grainy set even in a water bath.
- The water bathHot, not boiling, water reaching halfway up the cups, and it should never simmer during baking. A folded towel or a sheet of paper under the cups keeps the bottoms from taking direct heat off the pan.
- DonenessExpect 30-40 minutes for standard 6 oz cups. The custard is done when the edges are set and the centre still wobbles as a single mass — it firms as it cools. A knife inserted an inch from the rim should come out clean.
- Loaf sugarSugar was sold in hard cones to be broken and crushed; the modern equivalent is plain granulated. "Sufficient to sweeten" works out to about 3/4 to 1 cup for this quantity.
- The vanilla beanPounding the whole bean puts seed and pod straight into the milk, giving a strong flavour but leaving black specks and fibre. Scrape the seeds and steep the pod in warmed milk for 20 minutes if you want it smooth, then strain.
- Strain before fillingPass the mixture through a fine sieve into a pitcher and skim the foam off the top. Bubbles left on the surface bake into a pocked skin and spoil the turned-out shape.
- Turning outCustards unmould more cleanly when well chilled, so several hours in the cold helps. Butter the cups first. Served hot they are easier left in the cup, though the original directs turning them out.
- YieldThree pints of milk plus eight eggs makes over 60 fl oz of custard, enough for roughly ten to twelve standard 6 oz custard cups.
Oscar Tschirky ran the dining rooms of the Waldorf, and later the Waldorf-Astoria, from 1893, and his 1896 book sets down the hotel's working repertoire rather than anything showy. Baked cup custard was among the plainest sweets such a kitchen produced, a reminder that a grand kitchen turns out far more simple food than elaborate. Bottled vanilla extract was available by the 1890s, but this recipe calls for the whole bean pounded in a mortar. Loaf sugar, sold in solid cones and broken up with sugar nippers, had to be crushed before use.