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Royal Custard for Moulds of Aspic
Beat together one whole egg and three yolks; add one-fourth a teaspoonful, each, of mace, salt and paprica, and, when well mixed, add half a cup of cream. Bake in a buttered mould, set in a pan of water, until firm. When cold cut in thin slices, then stamp out in fanciful shapes with French cutters. Use in decorating a mould for aspic jelly.
How to Use Garlic or Onion in Salads.
The salad-bowl may be rubbed with the cut surface of a clove of garlic, or a chapon may be used. A chapon, according to gastronomic usage, is a thin piece of bread rubbed on all sides with the cut surface of a clove of garlic and put into the salad-bowl before the seasonings. It is tossed with the salad and dressings, to which it imparts its flavor. It may be divided and served with the salad. Oftentimes, instead of one piece, several small cubes of bread are thus used.
After a slice of onion has been removed, the cut surface of the onion may be pressed with a rotary motion against a grater and the juice extracted; or a lemon-squeezer kept for this special purpose may be used.
This is a royale — a firm savory custard baked in a water bath, chilled, and cut into shapes to decorate an aspic. The whole point is a slab dense enough to cut cleanly, so bake it low and slow and chill it thoroughly.
- Oven temperatureThe original assumes you know your range. Bake at 300–325°F; anything hotter puffs the custard, then it collapses and weeps, and the slices crumble under a cutter. It is set when the center barely trembles, roughly 25–35 minutes for a thin layer.
- Pan depth is the hingeUse a shallow mould or small loaf pan so the custard sets no more than half an inch thick. A deep mould gives you a thick, wobbly block that cannot be sliced thin enough to look like decoration.
- "Paprica"Paprika, spelled as it often was in American books around 1900. Sweet Hungarian paprika is what is wanted here — it is used for color and mild aroma, not heat, so smoked paprika would overwhelm the dish.
- MaceThe outer covering (aril) of the nutmeg seed, still sold ground. Its flavour is close to nutmeg's, generally described as the more delicate of the two. A quarter teaspoon in this quantity of egg is assertive; scale back if the custard is going into a delicate fish aspic.
- CreamThe recipe says only 'cream', which at the time could mean anything from a thin pouring cream upwards. A rich cream gives the firmest slices; half-and-half or milk will still set, but the slices are more fragile and the colour paler.
- Chilling and cuttingChill at least two hours, ideally overnight, before turning out. Cut with a thin knife dipped in hot water; for shapes, small aspic or truffle cutters do what "French cutters" meant — crescents, diamonds, stars, rounds.
- YieldOne whole egg and three yolks with half a cup of cream, baked in a shallow pan, gives a modest slab -- enough decoration for a mould or more. Trimmings are perfectly good chopped into a consomme or a salad.
- The garlic note that followsThe chapon paragraph is a separate hint tacked on in the original, unrelated to the custard. It remains sound practice: a crust rubbed with garlic and tossed with the leaves flavors a salad far more evenly than minced raw garlic.
A royale is one of the small workhorse preparations of the classic French kitchen: a seasoned egg-and-cream custard baked firm, then cut into shapes as garnish, most familiarly for clear soups as consommé à la royale. American cookbooks of the period borrowed it for the elaborate moulded aspics of turn-of-the-century company cookery, when a salad was as much a piece of construction as a dish — layers of jelly set over cut vegetables, truffle, hard-boiled egg white, and pale custard shapes arranged against the mould so the pattern showed through when it was turned out. Savoury baked custards of this kind persist elsewhere, but the aspic showpiece this one was built to decorate has largely fallen out of fashion.