The return of custard

Note: If you’ve arrived here via the One Local Summer weekly roundup, you can read my full post for week 3 here.

When I was a child, one of my favorite desserts that my mother made was rice pudding. Her recipe was not the creamy stirred pudding that my friends’ mothers served; rather it was a mixture of milk, egg and vanilla, to which my mother added leftover cooked rice and raisins before baking. The uncooked liquid wasn’t thick enough to hold the raisins and rice in suspension, so they sank to the bottom of the baking dish, creating a layered dessert of thick, sweetened rice under a classic egg custard. I didn’t like the raisins, and usually picked them out. (I still don’t much care for raisins baked in desserts.) The soft, vanilla-flavored rice was nice, but the best part of my mother’s rice pudding was the smooth, nutmeg-topped custard.

Why, then, has it been so long — over a decade, I’d guess — since I last cooked (or ate) an egg custard? I’ve baked the fancier, richer flan, learned to cook a crème anglaise, and tried my hand at Chinese dan-ta, and the gelatin-thickened Italian panna cotta and English honeycomb mould. Perhaps the egg custard of my childhood seemed too ordinary. Or perhaps I hadn’t yet found eggs and milk so delicious that I’d be inspired to use them to cook something so plain, and therefore so dependent on the quality of ingredients.

Whatever the reasons for my longtime neglect of them, I have recently returned to baked custards. The eggs and milk that I purchase from some of my favorite farmers produce flavorful results in any recipe; in custard they truly shine. In my efforts to eat local foods, I’ve been substituting honey for sugar; in egg custard, the local wildflower honey I use is a lovely floral compliment to the non-local vanilla paste and nutmeg that I couldn’t give up.

Baked Egg Custard

• 3 cups milk (or 2 3/4 cup milk plus 1/4 cup cream)
• 4 large eggs (if you’re lucky, you’ll get an extra yolk)
• 1/4 cup honey (use a little more if you like it sweet)
• 1 1/2 teaspoons vanilla paste
• freshly grated nutmeg

Preheat oven to 300°F. Place six 6-ounce ramekins (or small oven-safe cups or baking dishes) in a deep baking pan just large enough to hold them.

In a saucepan, heat the milk (and cream, if using) over medium-low until is just starts to simmer. Remove milk from heat.

In a bowl, whisk together the eggs, honey, and vanilla. While whisking continuously, slowly pour the hot milk into the egg mixture. Pour the mixture through a fine strainer into the ramekins. Grate some nutmeg onto the top of the custard.

Pour hot (not boiling) water into the baking pan until it reaches halfway up the sides of the ramekins. Bake until the custard is just set (a little jiggle in the middle is fine), 30 to 35 minutes.

Many recipes will instruct you to chill your egg custards for at least a couple of hours before serving. Chilling may provide time for the flavors to meld and deepen, but I will tell you that warm egg custard is even more comforting than cool. If you’ve reached the end of a long, hard day, and have the good fortune to have a recently-baked egg custard available, then curl up on your sofa with a warm ramekin in one hand and a spoon in the other. Take a bite of custard; it will melt into creamy vanilla-nutmeg bliss on your tongue. Close your eyes. Take a deep breath; take another bite. Now, isn’t that better?

(And if the next morning dawns still looking a little bleak, egg custard makes a very fine breakfast.)

Where’s it from?
Eggs: Skagit River Ranch, Sedro-Wooley, WA
Milk: Sea Breeze Farm, Vashon Island, WA
Cream: Golden Glen Creamery, Bow, WA
Honey: Rockridge Orchards, Enumclaw, WA
Vanilla & nutmeg: islands far away

Tagged as: custard