Long Live The Custard!
After a surprising discovery of the in’s and out’s of British custard and an extensive undertaking to understand it better, I start a quest to decide why Brits are so obsessed with this product and how it has evolved through the years.
The discovery
As a chef and foodie, I have always enjoyed food shopping in the same way some people adore buying clothes. I savour the idea of spending my time surrounded by possibilities. Now with a third lockdown in place not only is this my favourite activity it seems to be the only one that doesn’t involve an awkward zoom meeting, being outside in the cold unpredictable London weather, or trapped in the four walls of the tiny studio I live in. The fascination is greatly augmented by the fact that as a Colombian living in London, British supermarkets are foreign, unexplored territory. There is so much to unpack on every aisle. This is where my quest began.
As I walk through the dessert aisle marvelling and pointing out all the things I haven’t tried yet my partner gasps in disbelief when I mention I have never had a sticky toffee pudding, “a crime!” he says. He is set on correcting the situation immediately and then he says “wait we need custard as well, you can’t have sticky toffee pudding without custard”. “Custard?” I whisper, “We’ll need some eggs then’’ Looking puzzled he laughs and says “we can just get a tub of it.” I was, to put it shortly, quite sceptical. The food snob in me thinking, there is no way this will measure up to the real deal. I microwaved it, expecting it to be gloppy, curdled, and eggy. Instead, I was surprised at the lingering vanilla flavours, the creaminess of it, and most importantly the convenience of it all. By the third spoonful of store-bought custard, I was ready to pour it over my cereal and eat it like that.
Why, then would anyone consider doing custard from scratch? As a chef, I’ve made custard more times than I can remember. It is the base for many other preparations such as ice cream and creme bruleè. Though the ingredient list is not extensive the recipe itself is tricky for the inexperienced cook. A proper custard is made by combining egg yolks with sugar and then whipping those with warm milk until achieving a creamy consistency. A finicky process that most of the time ends up in something that resembles more scrambled eggs with cream than the almost liquid yet a bit solid Newtonian fluid we are supposed to be cooking, an ability most likely achieved by having ruined one too many custards. It requires a certain amount of patience that most homeowners don’t have after a long day of hustling to afford to buy the good vanilla, the stuff you should be using on a homemade custard worthy of your time.
Most importantly most custard recipes follow an outdated, unnecessarily complicated process. You see, the original method, the same one that I myself learned in culinary school not too long ago; involves heating your dairy before tempering it with the eggs, adding hot milk to cold yolks, and praying for them not to cook as you whisk them frantically. A step that made sense, when dairy was fresh and heating it up was necessary for consumption. Harold McGee, author of On Food and Cooking, AKA the food science bible; states that “Though scalding was a form of insurance in times when milk quality was uncertain, it can now be dispensed with in custard making (…) A custard mixed cold has just as even a texture and sets almost as quickly as a pre-scalded one.”
It never fails to astound me that the food industry and the ingredients we cook with has changed so significantly over the years yet we continue to cook recipes in the same ways Escoffier did. With so many chances of it going wrong, it comes as no shock that someone decided to streamline the process, yet I never considered it to be such an essential product that every supermarket would carry it. It turns out ready-made custard is not only common but a grocery list staple. The moment I discovered custard, I went down a rabbit hole. It felt to me like I was discovering the British had outsmarted all of us when it came to custard. Having been to over a 120 different countries and having explored more supermarkets that I can count, a hobby of mine; this was the first time I had seen custard offered in this way.
Digging further I found myself enthralled with the facts. Around the world, custard is mostly referred to as creme Anglaise, french for English cream. Not inherently surprising considering the french have historically patronized culinary lexicon and Frenchified all kitchen terms, I am instead flabbergasted by the idea that the french themselves couldn’t claim custard as their own. It was such a British contrivance that even they credited it to them. Let it be known that even the french think this cream is English.
Custard is everywhere. Poured over every pud and eaten at every festivity. It’s in the filling of doughnuts, in the flavour of candies, it even trended on Twitter in the UK on January 25th, 2021 for no apparent reason. To add to it all the pandemic has contributed to its ever-time popularity. At the beginning of lockdown Marks and Spencer reported an increase in sales of Bird’s Custard Powder by 187% compared to pre-lockdown sales, Co-op reported that sales of trifle packages, which also include the popular powdered custard, increased by 738%. Imagine thinking oh the world as we know it may be about to end, I better stock up ’cause, god forbid we run out of custard.
According to Report Ocean, custard powder will generate even greater revenue by 2025. Whether it has to do with the simplification of cooking processes, the surge of non-perishable consumption driven by post-pandemic fears, or the surge in the consumption of nostalgia-infused brands, custard isn’t going anywhere anytime soon.
Custard most definitely belongs to those food groups that sparkle a reaction of nostalgic feelings for Brits, in an almost Pavlovian way. Whenever approached about it, my British friends instantly recalled school meals and visiting their grannies. On this Henry Southan, a local former private school student says to me “Custard reminds me of school meals. It was always there for us at the dining table. There was always this kind of weird argument where half of us loved the skin that kind of formed on top and the other half hated it. Chocolate custard would be a great day of the week, that would completely change the day.” Perhaps this explains why for most people custard evokes memories of simpler, happier days; as we all aim to have that Ratatouille moment where the food critic Anton Ego rediscovers his love of life through a bite that takes him to his childhood memories in a show of the Proustian notion of how our senses invoke involuntary memories when exposed to certain stimuli such as the flavours we find comforting.
“We bloody love custard.” Southan says, “custard is a warm cuddle. It is quintessentially British. When you think of British puddings you think of crumble with custard you think of a jam roly-poly with custard, these are traditional especially during school settings” It feels as with every spoonful of custard I get closer to understanding the British palate.
I wanted to understand better the relationship that British people had with custard and the memories it evoked, and how that translated to their food choices today. This could perhaps shed some light on the industry and what led to its evolution. I spoke to Lily Davis, a local from Berkshire about her memories of custard. “Custard reminds me of school desserts like banana and custard which had those stringy bits of banana on it but it does bring back the nursery memories and then in primary school, we used to have this cake with sprinkles on top and custard and it was amazing. Now I only eat it on Christmas over apple pie, but I never make it from scratch. I’ll either go for the M&S Vanilla custard or Ambrosia because that’s nostalgic and I used to eat that when I was a kid” said Davis.
Little did I know then that no custard is created equal. When I first mentioned to my peers at University that I had become obsessed with supermarket custard and that I had just finished a Waitrose tub they laughed and accused me of being too posh and redirected me instead to the stuff that actual households consume: Bird’s “the original custard powder.” I quickly learned that in the UK, where you buy your groceries is considered a personality trait.
Understanding this was understanding that custard has undergone a long evolution from its origins, to its introduction to the industrialized world. I went on the lookout for the best possible product, the one that would put my homemade custard, or Mary Berry’s to shame. Was that even possible? Was I just dreaming? To understand custard I had to not only taste the custard, but I also had to be the custard.
The Testing
I tested over 10 different products and studied their origins to further discuss that not every custard is created equal nor is what everyone is looking for in them the same. Today, we have a market of products dedicated to the more gourmet palate, with ingredients such as Madagascan vanilla as is the case for Asda’s Extra Special Madagascan Vanilla Custard, M&S Gastropub Madagascan Vanilla Custard, Sainsbury’s Vanilla Custard, Taste the Difference and Waitrose’s №1 Madagascan Vanilla Custard, all of these depicting a more delicate profile, heavily speckled with vanilla seeds and a texture that closely resembles homemade custard. For most of these refined products aimed at a more bougie palate the custard does not rely on vanilla to carry it, it just allows it to enhance the natural richness of the cream. The magic of these products is how stable they are, making it possible to reheat them even in the harsh microwave without turning into a culinary disaster.
Artisanal custard that can be found in pastry shops and restaurants is also packed with the gourmet distinction. Humble Crumble Artisan Premium Vanilla Custard for example is made with the highest grade, pure Planifolia vanilla bean, which is sustainably sourced from Bali, Indonesia, and claims to support almost an entire village just by this one orchard. Sold at a booth at Borough Market by the ever-so-popular Instagrammable brand Humble Crumble, this custard is like the cooler, hipster friend that we all love and envy. It comes on a trendy glass jar with a short 5-item ingredient list and it is every bit as delicious as it is pretentious.
Perhaps one of the most evident products to showcase how much has custard evolved in the supermarket sphere is the development of an alternative vegan plant-based option: Oatly Whippable Vanilla Custard, which tastes like custard whilst lacking the main ingredients that define custard: Eggs and milk. This product further confirmed my suspicions on the vastness, albeit a bit ridiculous British custard market. While slightly earthy, this custard was smooth and glossy. I was curious to see if this product was available anywhere else or it was exclusive to the British market and how popular it was so I contacted Oatly. Linda Nordgren, Oatly’s Global VP Crisis and Community management, informed me that they “don’t have the custard in all of our markets, but quite a few” and that while she doesn’t “have any numbers on popularity, it is definitely well-liked by our UK consumers.” Nordgren kindly let me know that it was the “First time I think someone’s reached out to us about a special piece on custard” which confirmed my obsession had gone perhaps a bit too far.
The fact that more of these refined products are finding their way to British supermarkets talks about the culinary transformation that Britain has undergone in recent years to position itself as a culinary destination, as Anthony Bourdain wrote in his posthumous travel guide World Travel. “Any notion you might have that English food is bad, that’s hopelessly outdated thinking. In fact, London has long been a food capital… the very best ingredients, the best possible execution to honor these ingredients, and a love for what it means, has meant, and should mean, to cook and dine as an Englishman.”
Yet some people still prefer the flavours of the canned and powdered versions of the nostalgia-infused brands’ Ambrosia Devon Custard and Bird’s Original Custard Powder, both produced by Premier Foods, pioneer brands on streamlining custard and bringing it to the post-world war homes where creating this concoction from scratch became impossible to fit in busy working schedules and was then reserved for special occasions, such as Christmas.
Both Ambrosia and Bird’s achieved this in different ways, which has contributed to their success through the years.
For Ambrosia, the convenience of the non-perishable can plus the low price is deeply enhanced by the fact that this custard isn’t the vile gloppy mess I first expected. Truth be told canned products get too much of a bad rep when in reality they are a genius solution to the time-consuming, wasteful dealings of day-to-day cooking.
For Birds, the success came from being an affordable shelf-stable with low perishability, it’s popularity as it revolutionized the industry made it the custard of the people. Furthermore, it has the advantage of being egg-free; which prompted its creation when Alfred Bird invented back in 1837 due to his wife’s egg allergy, an ailment that’s estimated to be present in between 10 to 40% of the world population according to World Allergy Organisation. Instead, Bird’s relies on cornflour mixed with milk to form its thick custardy sauce. A secret formula protected by generations. When asked about it Premier foods stated: “We are unable to share our manufacturing process as this is deemed confidential to our business”
The Findings
So, what’s in a custard? Where does the preference for one style or the other come from?
As with most things food, we cannot separate it from all other aspects of our lives and as such, there’s a clear element to consider when talking about food preferences: what we can afford will highly affect the way we eat.
When contemplating the idea of fresh vs storebought custard a concept that often came afloat was the idea that buying ready-made custard, and further down the line, the powdered custard was more affordable than making it yourself. So in lieu of this, I did a price comparison of what making fresh custard costs. The biggest price difference is the type of vanilla you use. For a recipe containing one vanilla pod, the good stuff; you are looking at a cost of around £4.6 for 500 ml yet if made with a supermarket brand vanilla essence the price is considerably lower at around £1.4 for 500 ml; around the same amount you get in a refrigerated tub. While the use of vanilla widely changes the numbers, it turns out that a higher price not necessarily equates with more vanilla flavour as America’s Test Kitchen found out when tasting different vanilla brands, and a cheaper one may even get you closer to the desired nostalgic hints we associate with vanilla.
The price difference may not be abysmal compared to some of the gourmet refrigerated tubs that are real contenders to the fresh stuff but if you add to that the cost of cooking, the food waste, and most importantly the invisible yet most relevant cost of it all: time; it adds up. A commodity that is more scarce now than ever considering most of the cooking responsibilities still rely on women whose unpaid labour is worth an estimated £140 billion to the UK economy and that these statistics have only exacerbated by the pandemic setting back 25 years of gains in inequality, that refrigerated tub of custard looks more and more appealing by the second, a perfect response for those looking to close the gap of food elitism that means only those who can afford to do so can enjoy the gourmet products.
By the time I reached these conclusions, I had had custard over my pancakes, on desserts, baked, cooked, over ice cream, and by the spoonful. When my partner asked: “what’s for dinner?” I would reply: “custard!” The thought of it started to make him sick. It turned into an obsession. My colleagues teased me about it. I had become the custard queen. As a chef, foodie, and woman who has spent the greatest part of this last year dreaming about the day I get to eat out again and have someone else handle the dirty dishes I started to understand the appeal of these readily made products and welcomed the transformation that brought a loved nostalgic product to the gourmand supermarket gastrosphere. While I may lack the connection with the childhood memories it brings to most, I feel a little bit closer to this nation as I share their love for all things custard. I fell in love with how custard has breached the gaps of inequality in its transformation while preserving its culinary beauty. Long live ready-made custard and the geniuses behind it.
