It was Wednesday, exactly 10 weeks before Christmas Day, when I pushed my shopping buggy toward the Kroger dairy aisle and noticed an early arrival.
Lining a shelf next to the whole milk were plastic quart jugs of boiled custard — the Southern holiday drink sometimes mistakenly compared to the inferior but more widely known egg nog.
This annual sighting of boiled custard in the grocery store has become something I enjoy as a seasonal marker. And even though I think there’s a proper time for everything, including boiled custard only at Christmas (OK, and maybe Thanksgiving), I appreciate that there’s still enough of a following for this regional concoction to convince a grocery store chain to put it out around the same time shoppers are looking for Halloween chocolates.
A story that ran a few years ago in Garden and Gun magazine described boiled custard as a “long-lost Appalachian holiday treat.”
Well, maybe not so lost if it’s still showing up in just about every grocery store in Kentucky and Tennessee during the last three months of the year.
The Garden and Gun story has a recipe for boiled custard. It’s not an especially difficult recipe, but it does require constant stirring at the stove — and despite the name, there is no boiling, which would ruin the rich, creamy drink.
If any of our readers still make their own boiled custard, we’d love to hear from you — especially if you have a recipe that’s been handed down in your family. Email me at editor@hoptownchronicle.org
Jennifer P. Brown is co-founder, publisher and editor of Hoptown Chronicle. You can reach her at editor@hoptownchronicle.org. Brown was a reporter and editor at the Kentucky New Era, where she worked for 30 years. She is a co-chair of the national advisory board to the Institute for Rural Journalism and Community Issues, governing board past president for the Kentucky Historical Society, and co-founder of the Kentucky Open Government Coalition. She serves on the Hopkinsville History Foundation's board.
