Custard and Cream Sauces

Appears in

The Cook's Companion: A step-by-step guide to cooking skills including original recipes

Published 1991

About

Sweet egg custard is a wonderful sauce as well as being the base for many other puddings, ice creams and mousses. Although you can flavour it with endless variations such as lemon or orange rind, coffee, chocolate and a variety of liqueurs, the flavour of real vanilla from an infused vanilla pod is hard to match. Pastry cream, also called crème patis-sière or confectioner’s custard, a rich filling for fruit tarts, cakes, éclairs and profiteroles, is simply thickened custard.

A sweet sabayon, or the Italian version, zabaglione, is a rich mousseline sauce, so special it can even be served as a pudding on its own. Really an emulsified sauce of beaten egg yolks, sugar and a liqueur, usually Marsala, it is cooked carefully over a low heat, like hollandaise sauce. It can also be poured over fruit and then glazed under a grill at the last minute.