No. 3161

Custard or Bain-Marie Cream with Caramel

Creme Bain-Marie au Caramel

Melt half a pound of sugar in a pan with the juice of a lemon; as soon as of a light golden color pour a third part of it into the bottom of a plain timbale mold and leave to cool. Break six whole eggs in a basin, add eight yolks and beat together with half a pound of sugar; dilute with a quart of good milk and a quarter of a gill of orange flower water or vanilla and strain this preparation two or three times through a colander, and pour it into the timbale mold, then poach the cream in a bain-marie in a slack oven for an hour and a quarter; remove and cool off in the bain-marie. When ready detach it from the mold with the blade of a small knife and turn it over on a cold dish; cover with a caramel syrup made with the remainder of the caramel.

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For the Modern Kitchen

This is crème caramel in its grand-hotel form: a single large moulded custard rather than individual ramekins, which changes the baking time and the unmoulding more than anything else. The one thing to get right is the oven — a slack oven means low, and a custard pushed past about 175F will curdle and weep no matter how carefully it was strained.

Slack ovenRead this as a low oven, somewhere around 275-300F. The water bath buffers the heat, but at 350F and above a custard this deep will set at the edges and stay loose in the middle, then break as it cools.
A gillA gill is half a cup, so a quarter gill is 2 tablespoons. That is a generous but not excessive amount of orange flower water; if yours is a concentrated modern brand, start with a teaspoon and taste the raw mix. Vanilla is offered as the alternative under the same liquid measure, so it is a vanilla essence or extract rather than a spoonful of anything thicker.
Timbale mouldA plain, straight-sided, deep metal mould of roughly two quarts. A charlotte mould, a deep cake tin with a solid base, or a 2-quart soufflé dish all work; the depth is what makes the hour and a quarter reasonable.
The caramelHalf a pound of sugar is about 1 1/8 cups. The lemon juice is there as an acid to invert some of the sugar and discourage crystallisation. Pour the first third into the mould while it is still fluid — it sets glassy within a minute — and hold the rest off the heat.
The reserved caramel syrupThe remaining two-thirds of that half pound, roughly 5 ounces of hard caramel, is not a sauce. Add a few tablespoons of hot water to it off the heat, standing back from the spitting, and warm gently until it dissolves into a pouring syrup. Left as it is, it will set into a slab.
Egg ratioSix whole eggs plus eight yolks to a quart of milk is very rich by modern standards and gives a dense, sliceable custard rather than a quivering one.
StrainingThe instruction to strain two or three times is not fussiness. It removes chalazae and any thread of cooked egg from the sugar-beating, which is the difference between a smooth cut face and a speckled one.
Doneness and timingStart checking at an hour. The custard is done when the outer two inches are set and the centre still trembles as a single mass; an instant-read thermometer should show 170-175F at the middle.
Cooling and unmouldingCooling in the bain-marie, as directed, prevents cracking. Then chill it thoroughly — several hours or overnight — so the caramel in the base liquefies into syrup and the custard firms enough to turn out cleanly.
YieldA quart of milk and fourteen eggs gives twelve to sixteen portions, which is the scale Ranhofer worked at.

A Little History

Ranhofer published The Epicurean in 1894 after decades running the kitchen at Delmonico's in New York, and the book is essentially a French professional repertory transplanted whole. This is the classic crème renversée au caramel — a baked custard turned out of its mould so the caramel lining becomes the sauce — and it sits in a long numbered run of bain-marie creams, including a coffee version, each a variation on the same base. The bain-marie itself, a water bath named for an alchemical Mary of uncertain identity and generally traced to medieval Latin distilling texts, is what makes egg cookery of this kind possible at all: it caps the temperature the custard can reach. Orange flower water as the first-named flavouring, with vanilla as the alternative, places the recipe firmly in the nineteenth century rather than the twentieth — distilled floral waters were standard pastry flavourings long before vanilla became cheap enough to use by default.