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Caramel Custard
Mrs. Perry Smith.
One quart of milk, one cup of white sugar, one cup of brown sugar, two tablespoons corn starch, four eggs and a pinch of salt and vanilla. Place the milk with the white sugar and salt in a farina kettle over the fire; if you have not such a kettle, a tin pail set in a pot of hot water will answer the purpose; beat the eggs without separating in a large bowl, and wet the corn starch with a little cold milk; put the brown sugar in a tin pan and set over the fire; stir until it is thoroughly scorched, but not burned; then turn the scalding milk on the eggs; put the mixture in the kettle again over the fire; stir in the corn starch until it thickens; lastly, stir in the scorched sugar and remove from the fire: then add a generous amount of vanilla. The scorched sugar falls into the custard in strings, but these will dissolve with vigourous stirring after removal from the fire. Turn into custard glasses and serve cold.
A stirred caramel custard, thickened with both egg and cornstarch, so it sets soft in glasses rather than being unmoulded. The whole thing turns on the double boiler and on stopping before the eggs curdle.
- Farina kettleA double boiler, sold in the period for cooking cereals. The improvised version given here — a tin pail set in a pot of hot water — works exactly as well; keep the water at a bare simmer, not a rolling boil.
- Scorching the brown sugarThis is dry caramel. One cup of brown sugar in a heavy pan over medium heat, stirred until it liquefies and darkens and smells nutty. The line between scorched and burned is perhaps thirty seconds wide; pull it while it still smells sweet, because bitter caramel will carry through the entire quart.
- Tempering"Turn the scalding milk on the eggs" means pour it in slowly while whisking hard, not all at once. Pour it back into the double boiler and cook, stirring, until the cornstarch has thickened it. The starch gives the eggs some protection, but keep the water at a simmer and stir constantly, or the egg will still curdle.
- CornstarchTwo tablespoons in a quart gives a light set, closer to a pouring custard than a pudding. Slake it in a few tablespoons of cold milk first, as directed, or it will lump.
- Caramel in stringsHot caramel hitting cool custard seizes into threads. That is expected. Stir off the heat until they dissolve; if a few stubborn pieces remain, strain the custard through a sieve as you fill the glasses.
- SugarTwo cups of sugar in a quart is sweet by current taste. Cutting the white sugar to half a cup leaves the caramel flavour intact and the custard less cloying.
- Vanilla"A generous amount" would likely have meant a teaspoon or two of extract. Add it after the pan comes off the heat so it does not cook away.
- Yield and chillingAbout six to eight small custard glasses. Cover the surface with plastic wrap pressed down if you dislike skin, and chill at least three hours; the cornstarch continues to firm as it cools.
Caramel custard here is not the moulded flan of Spain and Latin America, where liquid caramel is poured into the dish and the custard baked over it in a water bath. This is the American stirred version: the caramel is made separately as dry-burnt sugar and beaten into a boiled custard, a technique nineteenth-century cookbooks also used to colour soups, gravies and "browning" for cakes. Corn starch had become widely available in American kitchens by the 1860s and 1870s, and appears often in custards of this kind. The Home Cook Book, compiled in Chicago from contributed receipts, credits this one to Mrs. Perry Smith, one of hundreds of named contributors whose kitchens the book was assembled from.