Home › Extra-Special Company Cakes and Cookies › Parsley Cubes
Parsley Cubes
4 beaten eggs 4 tablespoons milk 1/2 teaspoon salt 4 teaspoons chopped parsley When eggs are beaten thick and smooth, add salt, milk and parsley. Grease a small square dish, pour in the mixture and bake in pan of boiling water in moderate oven until firm. Cut into small cubes and drop several into each soup service.
This is a savory baked egg custard, cut into cubes and used as a garnish for clear soups. The whole trick is gentle heat: the water bath is not optional.
- Oven temperatureA moderate oven is 350F. At much more than that the custard puffs, then weeps and turns spongy when cut.
- The water bathSet the greased dish in a larger pan and pour in boiling water to come partway up the sides. The recipe specifies boiling water, which shortens the time needed to bring the custard up to setting heat.
- Pan sizeA "small square dish" here means something shallow: this quantity in a 6-inch square pan gives a custard roughly half an inch deep. Much deeper and the center is still liquid when the edges have set.
- DonenessExpect 20 to 30 minutes. It is firm when the surface no longer trembles as a whole and a knife tip near the center comes out clean. Overbaking is what makes the cubes rubbery rather than sliceable.
- Beating the eggs"Beaten thick and smooth" is best read as well blended rather than foamy; air bubbles bake into holes that make the cubes crumble at the cut. Straining the mixture through a sieve before pouring gives a cleaner, denser set.
- ParsleyChop it fine and dry it well before folding it in. Flat-leaf and curly both work.
- Cutting and servingCool completely in the pan before turning out, then cut into 1/2-inch cubes with a thin knife wiped between cuts. This quantity gives roughly a cup of cubes; the recipe calls for several per portion, so it will garnish a number of bowls. Add them to the hot soup at serving so they do not break up.
- KeepingThe baked custard holds a day or two covered in the refrigerator. Cut it cold; it does not freeze well, as the egg weeps on thawing.
Cubes of firm baked egg custard dropped into clear broth are the garnish French kitchens call royale, and consommé royale appears on formal menus of the later nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. The point of the garnish is contrast: a clarified consommé has nothing to chew, so a cook adds something with body but no cloudiness, which is why the custard is baked separately and cut rather than stirred into the pot. Herb-flecked versions such as this parsley one are among the recorded variations on the plain royale.