Home › Left-Over Fruit › Soft Custard
Soft Custard
1 pint milk Yolks 3 eggs Few grains salt 3 tablespoonfuls sugar teaspoonful vanilla or piece lemonrind Scald milk with lemon-rind, beat yolks, sugar, and salt together. Combine by pouring hot milk gradually on yolks and sugar, stirring meanwhile.
Strain mixture into double boiler and cook until thickened slightly. Remove at once from double boiler and cool. If vanilla is preferred, add when custard is cold.
A stirred custard — what a French kitchen calls crème anglaise — poured over stewed or fresh fruit. The whole recipe hinges on stopping the cooking before the eggs scramble.
- The hinge: pull it earlyThe custard is done at 170–180°F, when it coats the back of a spoon and a finger drawn through leaves a clean track. Above about 185°F the yolk protein sets into curds. The instruction to remove it from the double boiler at once is the point of the recipe: the hot ceramic or metal keeps cooking it, so decant into a cold bowl immediately.
- Quantities in modern termsA pint is 2 cups of milk (US measure; if you are working from a British reprint, 20 fl oz). Three yolks to a pint gives a pouring custard, not a set one. Yield is a scant 2 cups, enough to sauce fruit for four.
- ScaldingBring the milk just to the point where it steams and bubbles ring the pan edge, roughly 180°F. With the lemon rind in, let it stand off the heat ten minutes before combining so the oils infuse.
- Tempering"Pouring hot milk gradually on yolks" is tempering, and gradually means a ladleful at a time for the first cup while whisking. Dumping it in at once will thread the yolks with cooked egg.
- Double boilerUse a bowl or pan set over — not touching — barely simmering water. A heavy saucepan over low direct heat works and is faster, but demands constant stirring with a spatula into the pan corners.
- Strain twiceThe recipe strains before cooking, to catch chalazae and rind. Strain again after cooking as insurance against any curd that formed; it rescues a custard that has gone slightly grainy.
- Vanilla lastAdding vanilla when the custard is cold is deliberate — the aromatics in an alcohol extract flash off in hot milk. If you use a vanilla bean instead, split and infuse it with the milk at the scalding stage.
- Lemon rindPare it in wide strips with no white pith, which turns bitter with long steeping. Remove before or during straining.
- The three whitesThey keep several days refrigerated and freeze well, so they need not be wasted.
Soft custard is the English form of what French kitchens standardised as crème anglaise, and its practical appeal is easy to see: it is a sauce built from three things a household nearly always had going spare — milk, yolks orphaned by a meringue or an icing, and fruit past its best for the table. Stewed apples, a few soft pears, the last of a compote: cover them with cold custard and they become a dessert rather than a problem. The instruction is simply to cook until thickened slightly, and the caution behind it is the familiar one — the sauce must come off the heat as soon as it does. The choice offered between vanilla and lemon rind reflects what was to hand in the pantry.