I love the old-fashioned goodness of custards, so decided to give a hundred-year-old recipe for Maple Custard a try. The recipe only had four ingredients – eggs, milk, maple syrup, and a little salt, and was easy to make. Maple Custard is a baked custard. It was lovely, and reminded me a bit of Creme Brulé – though the lovely maple flavor was dispersed throughout the creamy custard rather than concentrated in a caramelized top.
Here’s the original recipe:
This recipe made enough to fill six of my custard cups, so I ended up with six servings. Maybe the recipe author had larger custard cups.
Here’s the recipe updated for modern cooks:
Maple Custard
3 eggs
3/4 cup maple syrup
2 cups milk
dash salt
Preheat oven to 350° F. Put eggs in mixing bowl and beat until smooth. Add maple syrup, milk, and salt; beat until thoroughly combined. Pour mixture into custard cups, leaving at least 1/2 inch at the top of each custard cup. ( 4 – 6 custard cups will be needed. The number of custard cups needed will vary depending upon the size of the custard cups.) Place the custard cups in a pan with hot water that comes to about an inch below the top of the cups. Bake for 40 – 60 minutes or until a knife inserted in center of the custard comes out clean. May be served warm or cold.
Yum! My mom made something similar, she loved custards of all types. She used evaporated milk.
I like how you linked this post to my previous post about a 1923 ad for Carnation Evaporated Milk. I never thought that there might be a relationship when I wrote them. It’s interesting that your mother used evaporated milk when making custard. It seems like it was more popular mid-century than it is now. Do you have a sense of why she used it? — to reduce baking time? . . taste?
To save money no doubt, and because there was always some on the shelf, and somewhere along the line she learned it made the best custard without using the precious cream!
I love custard. I have all the ingredients so I am ready to make it.
I think that you will like it.
My daughter would love this.
It’s yummy.
Delightful! Custard is one of our favorites so this is definitely on the menu this week!!!
It’s a nice recipe. I think that you’ll enjoy it.
This sounds wonderful. I do wonder what size cups were being used since you got six and I think the dishes you have are a size that many of us have and have been around forever. One note on those dishes, my mother discovered that the plastic lids that go on prune and raisin tubs and similar sized containers fit those custard cups perfectly. So six would be fine because I have sealing plastic lids I can put on my custard cups!!
I’ve also had my custard cups for years. I think that I bought them sometime during the first year after I got married. I filled one of my cups with water to the very top of the rim, and then poured the water into a measuring cup. It looks like it holds about 3/4 cup -though that is much fuller than the actual amount that would be put into the cup when making custard. I think that I probably put about 1/2 cup of the custard mixture into each cup. Thanks for the plastic lid tip.
Hope the lid thing works for you. Having lids for them has literally turned my custard cups into one of the most used items in the kitchen from pre-prep to leftovers. Admittedly my parents eat a lot of stewed prunes so I have more lids than custard cups.
I need to buy some prunes. 🙂
I love custard. I just might make this today.
It’s tasty. I like that you’ll like it.
It is tasty. It is a soft custard. Next time I will add an egg. I baked them for an hour. I think one more egg would make it a bit firmer.
Thanks for taking a moment to share how the recipe worked for you. These old recipes are always a bit quirky, and it helps other readers when they know how it worked for someone else – and how they they might adjust the recipe.
I do love custard! These are pretty also.
Thank you! They did look nice.
I was intrigued by your comment about similarity to creme brulee–one of my favorites!