BOILED CUSTARD.—
Make exactly the above mixture; but instead of baking, boil it in a porcelain lined sauce-pan, stirring it all the time. As soon as it comes to a boil, take it immediately from the fire, or it will curdle. Put it into a glass or china pitcher, and set it to cool. A bain-marie is excellent for boiled custard.
If custards are baked in cups, set them in an iron pan half full of warm water. If too hot, or kept baking too long, they will be tough and porous, and have whey at the bottom. So they will if the milk is warm when the eggs are added. Good custards will cut down to the very bottom as smooth and firm as the best blanc-mange.
APPLES BAKED WHOLE.—
Never bake apples without paring and coring. They will be found nearly all skin and core, and are troublesome and inconvenient to eat. Have fine large apples; take off a thin paring, and extract the core with a tin corer. Fill up the holes with brown sugar. Place the apples, side by side, in a square tin pan, set them in an oven, and bake them till, when tried with a fork, you find them soft all through. Send them to table warm, but not burning hot. If you have country cream to eat with them, so much the better.
BAKED PEARS.—
Take good-sized pears. Small ones are not worth the trouble of cooking. Peel them, split them in half, and remove the core, the stem, and the blossom end. Strew them well with brown sugar, and lay them on their backs in a large baking dish. A narrow slip of the yellow rind of lemon or orange, (cut so thin as to look transparent,) will be a great improvement, laid in the hollow of each pear. Also the juice squeezed. Put into the dish sufficient molasses or steam-syrup to well cover the pears. Place them in an oven, and bake them till they are soft, but not till they break. If you have no lemon or orange, season them with ground ginger or cinnamon.