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Vegetable Cubes
1/2 cup mashed peas salt, pepper, cayenne nutmeg Mix yolks of egg, whole egg, peas and seasonings, add hot stock. Pour into buttered tin to the depth of one inch, set into hot water, and bake in slow oven until mixture is firm. Cool, cut in cubes, and serve in soups.
This is a vegetable royale — a savoury baked custard cut into shapes and dropped into clear soup. The printed ingredient line is truncated in the original, so the egg count and stock quantity have to be reasoned out from the method.
- The missing quantitiesThe original lists only "cup mashed peas" and the seasonings; the egg yolks, whole egg and stock appear in the method but never with amounts. A workable royale runs about 2 yolks and 1 whole egg to 1 cup of liquid (peas plus stock combined). Any figure beyond that is a reconstruction, not what the book says.
- Slow ovenIn period usage roughly 250-325F; around 300F suits a custard. The custard should set without a single bubble rising; too hot an oven curdles the egg and the cubes turn spongy and weep in the soup.
- The water bath is the hinge"Set into hot water" means a bain-marie — the tin sits in a larger pan with hot water reaching roughly halfway up. This is what keeps the custard smooth enough to cut into clean-edged cubes. Skip it and the mixture sets unevenly and crumbles under the knife.
- One inch deepTake this literally. Deeper than an inch and the centre is still liquid when the edges have overcooked; the cubes are meant to be small enough to sit on a spoon.
- Testing for firmRoughly 25-35 minutes at that depth. It is done when the surface no longer ripples if the tin is nudged and a knife tip comes out clean. Cool completely before cutting — warm royale tears.
- The peasFresh shelled peas cooked soft and pressed through a sieve give the colour the dish is after. Frozen peas work; canned ones give a duller, greyer custard. Sieving rather than mashing matters, since any skin left in shows as flecks.
- Hot stock, added lastThe recipe calls for hot stock. Add it gradually to the already-beaten eggs rather than all at once, or it can scramble the yolks before the custard ever reaches the oven.
- Yield and servingA cup of pea puree with the eggs and stock fills a small loaf tin to about the inch specified and yields enough garnish for six to eight bowls. Add the cubes to hot consomme at the table, not in the pot, or they break up.
Garnishes of this kind are the French royale, a firm unsweetened egg custard baked in a water bath, chilled, and cut into cubes, diamonds or small stamped shapes to float in clear soup — the classic consomme a la royale. Professional kitchens of the period made them in a range of colours: green from peas or spinach, red from tomato or carrot, pale from chicken puree, and the point was as much visual as culinary, since a clear consomme was judged partly on what was suspended in it. Its appearance in Lowney's Cook Book, a book published by a chocolate manufacturer and aimed squarely at the American home cook, shows how thoroughly French service conventions had filtered into domestic kitchens by the turn of the century — a household that would never staff a garde-manger was still expected to know that a plain soup wanted something cut into cubes floating in it.