[Sca-cooks] "Custard" Crust?

[Jessica Tiffin]

At 05:20 AM 4/15/05, Christianna wrote:
>I just saw a factoid on "Good Eats" that said before 1600, the word
>"custard" refered to the crust and not the filling.  I've never seen this,
>does anybody recognize this referenc?
This is an interesting point. I've just done a research paper on custards, 
and actually none of the recipes I looked at call themselves "custards" 
until the late 16th century - they're egg flans, darioles, doucetes, 
flathonys, whatever. However, when the word "custard" does turn up, at 
least in the recipes I surveyed, it's applied to a _crustless_ egg/milk 
mixture, not to a tart.  Both Good Huswifes Jewell (1596) and Elinor 
Fettiplace (1604) quite straightforwardly assume a custard to be a 
crustless creature.  There's quite an interesting gap in the etymology, if 
it does indeed derive from "crustade": we have a Missing Link, i.e. a 
crusted custard actually called a _custard_.  The Elizabethan "custard" as 
a crustless dish seems to arrive out of thin blue air.

The research paper, with more custard recipes than you could shake a stick 
at, is up at http://users.iafrica.com/m/me/melisant/cook/custard.htm.

JdH

Baroness Jehanne de Huguenin (Jessica Tiffin) * Drachenwald Chronicler
Shire of Adamastor, Cape Town, South Africa
melisant at iafrica.com ***  http://users.iafrica.com/m/me/melisant
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