Custard in a glass bowl.

Dessert custard.

Custard is a range of preparations based on milk and eggs, thickened with heat. Most commonly, custard refers to a dessert or dessert sauce, but custard bases are also used for quiches and other savoury foods. As a dessert, it is made from a combination of milk or cream, egg yolks, sugar, and vanilla. Sometimes flour, corn starch, or gelatin are also added.

Custard is usually cooked in a double boiler (bain-marie) or heated very gently on the stove in a saucepan, though custard can also be steamed, baked in the oven with or without a hot water bath, or even cooked in a pressure cooker. Cooking until it is set without cooking it so much that it curdles is a delicate operation, because only 5-10°F (3-5°C) separate the two. A water bath slows heat transfer and makes it easier to remove the custard from the oven before it curdles.¹

Depending on how much egg or thickener is used, custard may vary in consistency from a thin pouring sauce (crème anglaise), to a thick blancmange like that used for vanilla slice or the pastry cream used to fill éclairs.

Custard is an important part of dessert recipes from many countries.

History

Custard was known in English cuisine at least as early as the fourteenth century. Recipes for custards baked in pastry (custard tarts) appear , under titles such as Crustardes of flessh and Crustade, in The Forme of Cury² and Harleain MSS 279 and 4016³. These recipes include solid ingredients such as meat, fish, and fruit, which are baked in the custard. Meanwhile, recipes for stirred custards cooked in pots appear in the same Harleian MSS as Creme Boylede and Creme boiled³.

Custard variations

While 'custard' may refer to a wide variety of thickened dishes, technically (and in French cookery) the word custard (crème or more precisely crème moulée) refers only to an egg-thickened custard.

When starch is added, the result is called pastry cream (crème pâtissière), which is made with a combination of milk or cream, egg yolks, fine sugar, flour or some other starch, and usually a flavoring such as vanilla, chocolate, or lemon. Crème pâtissière is a key ingredient in many French desserts including millefeuille (or Napoleons) and filled tarts. It also used in Italian pastry and sometimes in Boston cream pie.

When gelatine is added, the result is crème anglaise collée.

When starch is used alone as a thickener (without eggs), the result is referred to as a blancmange.

In the United Kingdom, 'custard' generally refers to a dessert topping made from cornflour rather than eggs, either bought ready-made, or made by adding hot milk to a powdered form. Custard is a staple of traditional school dinners, used as a topping for traditional British desserts like apple pie, spotted dick and rhubarb crumble. Since true custards are made with eggs, in the UK there is a distinction made between the true "egg-custard", found in custard tarts, and "ordinary" custard, the popular corn-flour variety.

Bird's Custard was the first and remains the most well-known brand of packaged custard mix in the UK, invented by Alfred Bird for his wife who was allergic to eggs. This variety of custard is sometimes combined with other ingredients, such as banana, chocolate powder, or strawberry Angel Delight, to make a variety of different colours and flavours of custard.

Savoury custards

Not all custards are sweet. A quiche is a savoury custard tart. Some kinds of timbale or vegetable loaf are made of a custard base mixed with chopped savoury ingredients. Custard royale is a thick custard cut into decorative shapes and used to garnish soup or broth. Chawanmushi is a Japanese savory custard, cooked and served in a small bowl or on a saucer.

Uses

Recipes involving sweet custard are listed in the custard dessert category, and include:

Physical properties

Cooked (set) custard is a weak gel which is viscous and thixotropic; while it does become easier to stir the more it is manipulated, it does not, unlike many other thixotropic liquids, recover its lost viscosity over time.⁴

A suspension of uncooked imitation custard powder or starch mixed with water in the right proportions has the opposite rheological property: it is negative thixotropic, or dilatant, which is to say that it becomes more viscous when under pressure. It is often used in science demonstrations of non-Newtonian liquids: see Oobleck. The British popular-science program Brainiac: Science Abuse demonstrated dilatancy dramatically by filling a swimming pool with this mixture and having presenter Jon Tickle walk across it; this was called "walking on custard." A similar exhibition was performed on the Discovery Channel series MythBusters, in which co-host Adam Savage traversed a tank filled with water and cornstarch.

References

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Custard

1. ^ Harold McGee, On Food and Cooking, 1984, ISBN 0-684-18132-0, p. 71
2. ^ Hieatt, Constance, and Sharon Butler. Curye on Inglysch: English culinary manuscripts of the fourteenth century (including the forme of cury). London, EETS SS 8, 1985.
3. ^ ^{a b} Austin, Thomas, ed. Two Fifteenth-Century Cookery Books. London, EETS OS 91, 1888, repr. 1964.
4. ^ Karla Longrée, Sharie Beaver, Paul Buck, Joseph E. Nowrey, "Viscous Behavior of Custard Systems", Journal of agricultural and food chemistry 14:6:653 (1966)[1]