No. 3159

Custard in a Dish

Creme au Lait Dans un Plat

Break four whole eggs in a tinned basin; add six ounces of powdered sugar; flavor either with vanilla, lemon or orange peel or else orange flower water or coffee, according to taste; whip into this one pint of boiling milk, into which has been infused the vanilla, lemon or orange peel or else coffee beans; strain all through a fine sieve, and with this preparation fill a china pie dish (Fig. 183); put it into a sautoir with a little boiling water on the bottom, and let cook in a slow oven from forty to fifty minutes; as soon as the custard is firm take it from the sautoir and leave stand to cool. When serving, a bed of whipped cream may be placed on top, flavored the same as the custard, and decorate it through a cornet.

← No. 3158 Crown Printaniere Cold Entremets — Creams, Jellies & Charlottes No. 3160 Custard or Bain-Marie Cream →

For the Modern Kitchen

A plain baked custard from Delmonico's kitchen, set in its serving dish rather than turned out. Everything depends on gentle heat and on not letting the eggs meet the boiling milk all at once.

The hinge: temper, then bake lowPour the boiling infused milk into the beaten eggs in a thin stream while whisking, not the other way round, or the eggs will scramble before they reach the oven. The straining step afterwards is not optional — it catches any threads that have set.
"Slow oven"Roughly 300F, though the book gives no temperatures and the period range for a slow oven is wide. The hotter the oven, the greater the risk the custard curdles and weeps, whatever care went into the mixing.
Sautoir with boiling waterA sautoir is a straight-sided shallow pan; here it is simply a water bath. Any roasting pan works, filled with boiling water to come halfway up the sides of the pie dish, on a rack in the middle of the oven.
Powdered sugarIn 1894 this meant sugar ground fine, closer to today's caster or superfine sugar, not the cornstarch-cut confectioners' sugar sold now. Six ounces to a pint of milk is a sweet custard by modern taste; four to five ounces suits most palates.
Tinned basinA copper or iron bowl lined with tin, the standard professional vessel; the tin kept the contents off the bare metal. Stainless steel or glass does the same job.
Judging donenessForty to fifty minutes is right for a shallow dish, but go by the custard: the centre should still wobble as a single mass when the dish is nudged, around 170–175°F. It firms further as it cools.
FlavouringsInfuse a split vanilla bean, a wide strip of citrus peel, or a couple of tablespoons of coarsely crushed coffee beans in the milk off the heat for fifteen minutes, then reheat to boiling and strain. Orange flower water is added cold to the finished mixture — a teaspoon is plenty, as modern bottles are strong.
CornetA paper piping cone, rolled from parchment and snipped at the tip. A small piping bag will serve the same purpose for decorating the whipped cream.
YieldA pint of milk and four eggs fills a dish serving four to six. Serve cold, from the dish it baked in.

A Little History

This is No. 3159 from The Epicurean (1894), Charles Ranhofer's enormous compendium of the cooking he oversaw for more than thirty years at Delmonico's in New York. Crème au lait dans un plat sits at the humblest end of a long section of cold entremets otherwise full of moulded bavarois and gelatine architecture: no unmoulding, no aspic, just eggs and milk set in the china pie dish they are carried to the table in. The distinction with the following entry, No. 3160 "Custard or Bain-Marie Cream," appears — to judge from the title alone — to be one of vessel and finish rather than substance, which would be a reminder that in a nineteenth-century professional kitchen the same few ratios of egg to milk were catalogued exhaustively by the form they took. The water bath itself was standard equipment long before it was standard advice; the point, then as now, is that the surrounding water cannot exceed boiling, so the custard never sees the fierce dry heat that would curdle it.