[Sca-cooks] "Custard" Crust?
Jessica Tiffin
melisant at iafrica.com
Fri Apr 15 00:35:41 PDT 2005
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
A wonderful bird is the Pelican, / His beak can hold more than his belly can.
He can hold in his beak enough food for a week,
and I'm damned if I see how the hell he can. (Spike Milligan)
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