Christmas Boiled Custard Recipe

bettyskitchen

Hi I’m Betty. Welcome to Betty’s Kitchen. Today we’re making Christmas Boiled
Custard and this is a traditional treat in central Kentucky and I don’t now how far it
extends but I tell you this recipe many years ago and the source was the mother-in-law of
my older sister. I have mentioned my other sister who is 1-year older than I. This is sister
was 2-years older than I and she passed away 9 years ago so I think of her at Christmas
time and she always was an inspiration to me in cooking because generally was one who
had the big family feast for everybody and we used— I love the recipes that she used but
she got this from her in-laws, her mother-in-law and it’s a wonderful recipe and I would
like to share it with you.

Boiled custard, so we’ll start with a sauce pan and 2 cups of milk and I’m just using skim
milk here you can use whenever kind you want and the first thing we’re going to do is
take this to the stove and we’re going to scald the milk. That’s going to take a minute or
so let me get this done and I’ll come back to you. This is my milk which has been scalded
and that means it is very hot. I don’t know if you can see the steam rising but it’s not at
boiling. It is not actually very near to boiling but it is very hot in order to speed up the
process which comes next. We add in some sugar. You just need ¼ a cup of granulated
sugar, just add that into your milk. You need a tiny bit of flour and this is just ½ teaspoon
of flour and that will go in. It will be stirred in.

Stir that very quickly so it doesn’t clot and once they just bounce around the top but it
will go in there. I think that will be fine. I’m going to reheat it and then a dash of salt. I
didn’t bother to get my box of salt out you know this is salt just a dash of it. Now this
goes back to the stove and what we do this time is we heat it almost to boiling but we do
not let it boil that’s a no, no. If you let it boil then it will have a tendency to curl. It will
have a different consistency. It will not be a beautiful custard like we want. So let’s go
back to the stove and I’ll come back after I have this 2 egg boil but not boiling just up to
that point. See that.

This mixture is very hot if I leave it much longer it will boil. I don’t want it to boil so turn
this off and bring it over here to finish that. What we’re going to do is you can use either
3 egg yolks or 2 whole eggs and beat them up so I’m just going to use the 2 whole eggs
which is going to wait there so I’ll just crack them and put them in a mixing bowl and
you need to beat this a little bit. This is going to be noisy so I probably come back when
they’re done. I have beaten the 2 whole eggs right here and this is my very hot mixture
that came form the stove. Now if I just dump this in it’s going to cook the eggs. I don’t
want that happening so I’m going to start beating the eggs again and just slowly pour this
in that’s when it’s going to work and then we’ll go back to the stove with because it has
to cook in order to finish up our custard. Okay here we go.

And you see that nice look that it has after you beat it in, it did not cook the eggs but this
is still a very hot mixture so bring it back into the sauce pan and then we go back to the
stove and we cook this long enough to coat a spoon. Actually in my recipe it says until it
coats a silver spoon so I don’t know if that’s just from the olden days or what I have a
silver spoon over here just in case we didn’t but the vanilla that I have here will come
lighter. I haven’t forgotten it. It’s going to be part of our custard that I’ve got to leave it
right now for a minute and get this to the point by cooking and stirring over low heat until
it coats a silver spoon.

I have been cooking this mixture for maybe a minute or so and I know it’s not merely
ready because I can just tell it’s too thin but just to show you in comparison to what it’s
going to look like when it’s done. Here I have a silver spoon and when I level that with
this mixture it’s not coating the spoon. It’s falling off of it. It should be thick enough to
stick to the spoon so I just put that aside and I will bring my testing spoon later. I’m
starting the custard. It heated to the point where it was coating spoon and it really doesn’t
really have to be a silver spoon so just let it coat a spoon and then bring it off and stir it
for a while to get it cool down and then after you got it cooled down add ½ teaspoon of
vanilla extract. That goes in and we’ll stir that in and then I’m going to serve it up and
show you the presentation and I hope you’ll enjoy it.

So I will serve this in a deep bowl and if you want to you can double the recipe and have
a whole bowl full here and then just use the ladle to dip them in to some kind of small
glasses. These are antique juice glasses so I found them interesting for this purpose and
just take a drink. It’s still warm, very warm. It’s really good.