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Boiled Custard
One quart milk, two table-spoons corn starch, two eggs, one-fourth tea-spoon salt, butter size of a hickory-nut; wet the starch in a little of the milk, heat the remainder to near boiling, in a tin pail set in a pot of boiling water. The proper heat will be indicated by a froth or film rising to the top; add the starch till it thickens, stirring constantly, then add the eggs well-beaten with four table-spoons of sugar, let it cook, stirring briskly, take off and beat well; flavor; served with grated cocoa-nut it is elegant.
A cornstarch-stabilised boiled custard, thinner than a modern pastry cream and meant to be poured or spooned rather than sliced. The whole thing hinges on heat control: the custard must thicken without ever reaching a boil.
- The tin pail in a potThis is a double boiler. Use a heatproof bowl or a saucepan set over an inch of simmering water, and keep the water below the base of the upper vessel so the milk heats gently.
- "Near boiling" and the filmThe froth or film the recipe describes rises on the plain milk somewhere short of the boil, in the region of 170-180F. Once the egg and sugar go in, keep the mixture below a boil: egg custards begin to curdle around 180-185F, though the cornstarch here gives some protection.
- Butter the size of a hickory-nutA hickory nut is roughly an inch across, so on the order of 1 to 2 teaspoons. It is there for richness and gloss, not structure, and the quantity is forgiving.
- Corn starchSame product as today's cornstarch. Slurry it with cold milk before adding, as directed, or it will lump; two tablespoons to a quart gives a pourable custard that just coats a spoon.
- Adding the eggsBeat the eggs with the sugar, then thin them with a ladleful of the hot mixture before returning them to the pan. The original assumes a cook who can stir fast enough to manage without this step; tempering makes it reliable.
- Beating off the heatThe instruction to "take off and beat well" stops the cooking and smooths any threads of set egg. Doing it immediately, off the burner, is what keeps the texture clean.
- FlavorVanilla extract, one to two teaspoons, added after the custard leaves the heat so the alcohol does not cook off. Nutmeg, lemon zest or a spoonful of sherry were all period choices.
- Yield and servingA quart of milk makes six to eight small cups. Serve chilled; press plastic wrap or buttered paper onto the surface while it cools to prevent a skin. The grated coconut goes on at the last minute.
Boiled custard was one of the two common household forms of custard in nineteenth-century American kitchens, distinct from the baked custard set in a dish and from the frozen custard that became ice cream. What may mark this version as later in the century is the cornstarch: commercially milled corn starch became available in the United States from the 1840s onward, and cookbook writers made use of it in custards, where a pure egg custard could break in seconds over an unpredictable wood or coal range. Two eggs to a quart of milk would be far too little to set a custard on their own, so the starch is doing most of the thickening here and the eggs supply flavor and color. The Dixie Cook Book (1883) was assembled from contributed household receipts and drew on the compiler's earlier Midwestern collections, and the closing note about grated coconut being "elegant" suggests that coconut still counted as a company-worthy garnish.