A custard story

I dropped my daughter-in-law and grandkids off at the airport this morning. They have been visiting all week and were supposed to fly home yesterday but JetBlue canceled their flight, giving us an extra day to enjoy our extremely energetic grandsons, 8 and 6. 

Yesterday we took them to our local Culver’s, the Wisconsin-based fast food chain, known for hamburgers served on buttered buns, deep-fried cheese curds (one of my least favorite words), and frozen custard. As we were sitting in our booth,  a message flashed on the closed-circuit TV screen Culver’s uses to promote its menu: “Share your custard story.”

I have a custard story but it's a story Culver’s will never share on its Facebook page or anywhere else. My mother used to tell this story, and it involves one of my four sets of great-grandparents, who were married in the 1870s. I’m not going to identify which set. They’ve been gone more than 100 years, and I don’t want to speak ill of the dead though I’m not above sharing this uber-embarrassing tale if I omit their names. 

My mother heard the story from her mother, who lived in Mineola, a tiny Missouri town where everybody knew everything about everyone. Grandma shouldn’t even have known the details but they were told to her by a gossipy friend, the wife of the town’s only doctor. It wasn’t ethical for the doctor’s wife to reveal intimate details about an unfortunate incident her husband shouldn’t have told her about in the first place but that’s how small towns work.

Culver's patrons may think of custard as a frozen dessert that comes out of a machine and is served in a cone or cup, but that’s not the only way custard is made. My custard story is about an altogether different type of custard, a liquid concoction America’s pioneers, including my great-grandparents’ parents, made for special occasions like their daughter’s wedding. It is made with heavy cream, egg yolks and sugar that is boiled together and served warm, in cups, on cold days. It is thick, meant to be sipped slowly, and tastes a bit like egg nog, but it’s richer, creamier and there’s no nutmeg. Mom always made a pot or two every winter and buried the pressure cooker in which she made it in a snowbank, to keep it fresh so she could warm it up and enjoy it a few cups at a time. I didn’t like mom’s custard as a boy and, once I heard this story, never touched the stuff again. 

At my great-grandparents’ wedding reception that wintry night long ago, guests enjoyed fiddling, dancing, cake and punchbowls filled with warm custard. The reception was, without doubt, one of the highlights of that year’s Mineola social calendar.  

The groom, who was having a particularly good time, downed cup after cup of custard before he and his bride left for the new house he had built on his farm a few miles south of town.

In the middle of the night the doctor and his wife were awakened by a pounding on the door. It was the bride who had fled the farm on horseback and was terribly upset. “Doctor, come quick. My husband is dying.”

When the doctor arrived, he discovered — there’s no delicate way to say it so if you’re eating as you read this, you might want to spit it out now — that the groom, who was so ill he couldn’t raise his head, had lost control of his bowels and squirted custard all over himself and the bed. Whether the marriage had been consummated at this point I have no clue, but it’s a safe bet to say that if it hadn’t been, the groom couldn't have talked his new wife into it even if he felt like getting it on, which he surely didn’t. 

 

The best part of the story was the punchline my mother delivered which, no matter how many times they had heard it, invariably sent her listeners into uncontrollable laughter. Mom delivered the line in complete seriousness, intent on giving the impression she was concerned, but you just knew she was having trouble not bursting out into a raucous laugh herself: “Grandma always said that her mother (the bride) was depressed her entire life.”

If your spouse had done diarrhea all over the bed on your wedding night, you’d be depressed too.

Luckily for me and their other descendants, the bride wasn’t so grossed out that she refused to allow her husband into their marriage bed ever again, because, over the next 10 years, and despite her melancholia, they had four children. 

——————————————————————————

When we returned from Culver’s, I called my sister and told her the restaurant chain was inviting customers to share their custard stories. “Do you think I should share our family’s?”

“Uh, I don’t think they’d publish it,” she said. 

“Grandma always said  …“ I said slowly, the way mom used to draw it out for effect. She finished the sentence: “The bride was depressed all her life!” We laughed and laughed until we couldn’t laugh any more although it really wasn't funny that our great-grandmother went through life under a melancholic cloud. 

"What a shitty way to start your married life," my sister said. We laughed some more, and agreed that nobody — nobody — could tell a story better than our mother. 

So that’s my custard story, which I’d like to end with a word of warning. If, by chance you decide to make custard — included below is a link to a recipe that basically replicates mom’s — for God’s sake, pace yourself.  

https://www.greedygourmet.com/recipes-by-course/desserts/boiled-custard/