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Soft Custard
cup sugar Flavoring Speck of salt Beat the eggs, add sugar and salt and scalded milk slowly. Cook in a double boiler, stirring constantly until the mixture coats the spoon, add flavoring.
A stirred custard sauce, cooked over water rather than direct heat. Everything depends on knowing when to stop.
- "Coats the spoon"This is the doneness cue, and it corresponds to about 170-180F. Lift the spoon and draw a finger through the film: if the track holds, the custard is set. Past 185F the eggs curdle and no amount of stirring brings them back.
- Double boilerUse a bowl or pan over barely simmering water, not boiling, and keep the base clear of the water. If you cook directly in a saucepan instead, use very low heat and a flat wooden spoon or silicone spatula worked into the corners.
- Scalded milkScalding means bringing milk to about 180F, when it steams and bubbles ring the edge, not to a rolling boil. It was generally said to make the milk keep better and shorten cooking; with pasteurized milk it is largely unnecessary.
- Adding the milk slowlyThe point of "slowly" is tempering. Pour the hot milk into the beaten eggs in a thin stream while whisking, so no part of the egg sets before the rest is warmed.
- Typical proportionsThe ingredient quantities here are incomplete. Soft custards in books of this kind commonly work out to roughly 1 to 2 eggs and 1 to 2 tablespoons sugar per cup of milk, more eggs giving a thicker sauce; a current recipe is the safer guide for amounts.
- FlavoringVanilla is the usual choice, and it goes in at the end as directed, since heat drives off the aroma. Nutmeg, a strip of lemon peel or a little sherry also appear in recipes of this type.
- Stopping the cookingStrain the finished custard into a cool bowl at once. The residual heat of the pan will keep cooking it, and straining catches any threads of set egg.
- ServingServe warm or chilled, plain in a cup for an invalid, or poured over stewed fruit, sponge cake or baked apples. Refrigerate promptly and use within two days.
Soft custard belongs to the "invalid cookery" chapters that were standard in household manuals from the mid-nineteenth century into the 1930s, when nursing the sick was work done at home and the cook was expected to feed a convalescent as much as a family. The prescription was usually much the same: milk, eggs, sugar, little seasoning, nothing fried and nothing highly flavored, on the reasoning that a weak digestion needed bland, concentrated nourishment. A custard cooked only to the coating stage was valued because it was liquid enough to be spooned or drunk by someone who could not chew. The same mixture, poured over cake and fruit, is the stirred custard of trifles and floating island.