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Good Baked Custard
Eight well-beaten eggs, leaving two whites for the top, three pints milk; sweeten and flavor to taste; bake for two hours in a slow oven. Beat the reserved whites to stiff froth with two table-spoons sugar, spread over the top and return to oven to brown.
A plain baked custard scaled for a large family dish, finished with a meringue rather than nutmeg. The original assumes you know the ratios and the signs of doneness, so the useful work is in filling those in.
- Slow ovenRead "slow oven" as roughly 300-325F. Custard sets on protein coagulation, not on browning, and much above 350F the mixture is liable to curdle and weep liquid.
- Quantities in modern termsThree pints of milk is 6 cups; eight eggs to that volume is a soft, spoonable set rather than a sliceable one. Sweetening "to taste" for this size normally lands between 3/4 and 1 cup sugar.
- Water bath, though it is not mentionedIn a modern oven, set the dish in a roasting pan of hot water reaching halfway up the sides; this is the single change most likely to save the texture.
- Scald and temperHeating the milk before whisking it into the eggs shortens the bake and gives a smoother set. Add it in a slow stream while whisking so the eggs do not scramble.
- Two hours is a maximum, not a targetAt 300F with a water bath, a 6-cup custard is usually done in 60 to 90 minutes. Judge by the centre: it should wobble as a mass while the edges are set, and a knife an inch from the middle comes out clean. Carry-over heat finishes it.
- Flavouring"Flavor to taste" here would most likely mean vanilla, lemon rind or grated nutmeg. Two teaspoons vanilla, or a nutmeg dusting over the surface, suits this quantity.
- The meringueTwo whites and two tablespoons sugar is a thin, old-style froth that browns fast. Spread it on the hot custard and return it to the oven for 8-12 minutes, or brown it briefly at 400F watching it closely.
- YieldServes 10 to 12. The mixture alone comes to nearly 7 cups, so use a dish larger than 2 quarts to leave room for the meringue. It can be baked in individual cups instead, which cuts the time to roughly 30-40 minutes.
Baked custard is one of the oldest surviving forms of egg cookery in English-language cookbooks, descending from the medieval "custarde" that began as a filling set inside a pastry crust; the name is generally traced through Old French, by way of forms such as croustade or crustade. By the time The Dixie Cook Book was compiled in the 1880s the crust had been dropped and the custard was simply poured into a dish. The reserved whites beaten with sugar and browned on top make use of what the recipe would otherwise leave over. Its place in a Southern collection also reflects the cost of a dish built on eight eggs and three pints of milk.