Home › The World's Kitchen › Vanilla Custard
Vanilla Custard
Crack four fresh eggs into a basin with two additional yolks, add five ounces sugar and two teaspoons vanilla essence. Sharply stir with a whisk for two minutes, then add one and a half pints milk and half pint cream; briskly whisk again for three minutes, then strain the preparation through a cheesecloth into a deep China baking dish. Place the dish in a tin, pour hot water to cover half the height of the dish and set in the oven to bake for thirty minutes. Remove, let cool off and serve.
A plain baked custard, and the original gives no oven temperature at all — the one number you most need. Everything else is a matter of translating pints and ounces and not overshooting the set.
- Oven temperatureBake at 325F. A hotter oven curdles the eggs at the edges before the center sets, and the custard weeps when cut.
- Quantities in modern termsFive ounces sugar is roughly 3/4 cup. If the pints are US pints, a pint and a half of milk is 3 cups and half a pint of cream is 1 cup, for 4 cups of liquid; if imperial, nearer 5 cups. Either way it is a lot of liquid against 4 whole eggs plus 2 yolks -- a soft, spoonable set rather than a sliceable one.
- Thirty minutes is optimisticFour cups of custard in a single deep dish will need 45 to 60 minutes. Judge by the center: it should still wobble as a unit when the dish is nudged, and an instant-read thermometer should show 170-175F.
- Vanilla essenceRead this as vanilla extract. The recipe calls for two teaspoons; strengths vary, so anywhere from one to two teaspoons will serve.
- WhiskingThe two-minute and three-minute whisks are meant only to dissolve the sugar and combine, not to aerate. Foam on the surface bakes into a pocked skin; skim it off after straining.
- The straining stepDo not skip the cheesecloth. It catches chalazae and any thread of cooked egg, and it is the difference between a smooth custard and a grainy one.
- The water bathHalf the height of the dish is right. Use water that is hot but not boiling, and set the tin on a folded towel or a rack so heat does not drive up through the base.
- Yield and servingServes six to eight. It is served cool here rather than cold; chilled overnight it firms considerably and takes well to a dusting of nutmeg or a spoonful of stewed fruit.
Baked custard of this kind — eggs, milk, sugar, a water bath — is a long-established item in European cookery, generally traced to the medieval "crustade" or custard tart, where the sweetened egg mixture was originally the filling of a pastry crust and later escaped it for a dish of its own. The instructions read as terse steps for someone who already knows the dish: crack, whisk, strain, bain-marie. The same base, chilled and turned out of a caramel-lined mold, becomes crème caramel, and cooked over water instead of in the oven becomes a pouring sauce.