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Creme Au the (Place two tablespoons best)
Place two tablespoons best quality tea in a hot teapot, pour over a gill boiling water and let infuse for twenty minutes.
Place two egg yolks and a whole egg in a bowl, add three ounces sugar, mix a little, then strain the tea through a cheesecloth into this bowl, adding two gills milk and one gill cream. Briskly whisk for two minutes, strain the preparation through the cheesecloth into six individual pudding moulds, place in a roasting tin, pour hot water in the tin up to half the height of the moulds, and set to bake in the oven for twenty minutes. Remove, let cool off, unmould on a cold dish and serve.
A baked tea custard, unmoulded and served cold — essentially a crème renversée in which strong tea replaces vanilla. Two things decide whether it works: the oven must be low, and the custard must be thoroughly chilled before you try to turn it out.
- GillsA gill is half a cup (4 fl oz). So: 1/2 cup boiling water on the tea, 1 cup milk, 1/2 cup cream — about 2 cups of liquid in all, counting the tea infusion, less whatever the leaves absorb.
- SugarThree ounces is a scant half cup by volume. Weigh it if you can; the custard is not overly sweet and the balance matters against 20 minutes of tannin.
- Oven temperatureNone is given here. Bake a water-bath custard at 325F. Any hotter and the eggs curdle at the edges before the centre sets, water bath or not.
- TimingTwenty minutes may not be long enough to set six moulds in a bain-marie; small darioles may just manage it, deeper moulds can want 30 to 45 minutes. Pull them when the custard is set at the rim and still trembles in a coin-sized circle at the centre.
- The 20-minute infusionSteeping black tea that long extracts a great deal of tannin; a gentler brew would be swallowed entirely by milk, cream and sugar. Use a good full-leaf black tea rather than a fine dust, which will turn genuinely bitter in that time.
- Egg ratio and unmouldingTwo yolks and one whole egg to two cups of liquid is a soft set, on the edge of what will stand up on a plate. Chill the baked custards several hours, ideally overnight, before running a knife round and inverting; unmoulding them merely "cool" will collapse them.
- StrainingThe second straining, through cheesecloth into the moulds, catches thread of coagulated white and any tea fines. Skip it and you get specks and a slightly rough texture. Skim any foam off the surface in the moulds as well.
- YieldSix small custards, about 1/3 cup each — a modest portion by modern standards. Ramekins or dariole moulds both work; wider, shallower dishes set faster.
Crème au thé belongs to the long French family of crèmes renversées — baked custards turned out of their moulds — which were flavoured with coffee, chocolate, praline, caramel or, as here, tea. Tea-flavoured desserts became easier once cheaper Indian and Ceylon black tea began to displace the costly China leaf over the course of the nineteenth century. The technique itself is the oldest thing on the page: infuse an aromatic in hot liquid, bind it with egg, bake it gently in a water bath, a method little changed since medieval custard-making.