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Chicken Custard
Chop cooked breast meat of fowl and rub through sieve; there should be one-fourth cup. Add one-fourth cup White Stock and one egg slightly beaten. Season with salt, pepper, celery salt, paprika, slight grating nutmeg, and few drops essence anchovy. Turn mixture into buttered mould, bake in a pan of hot water until firm; cool, remove from mould, and cut in small cubes. 1 egg
This is not a soup but a garnish for one — a savory baked custard, cut into cubes and dropped into clear broth at the table. The whole batch is tiny, and the only thing that can really go wrong is heat.
- Keep the oven lowThe recipe gives no temperature, but a moderate oven of about 325 tF suits it. Egg custard sets somewhere around 175 tF internally; push it faster and the protein tightens and weeps, leaving a spongy curd that will not cut cleanly into cubes. The water bath holds the temperature down, so keep the water hot but never simmering.
- TimingIn a small shallow mould the custard is firm in roughly 20 to 25 minutes. Test by touching the center — it should feel set, with no liquid slack under the surface.
- White StockA pale, uncolored broth of veal knuckle or fowl, simmered without browning. Any mild, clear chicken stock does the job; avoid anything dark or heavily reduced, since the point is a pale custard.
- Fowl versus chicken"Fowl" in cookery of this period generally meant an older bird, cooked long in liquid. Poached or leftover roast chicken breast works, though it is blander; a little more anchovy essence compensates.
- Rubbing through a sieveA small food processor gets the meat to a paste in seconds, but the sieve step still matters — press the purée through a fine mesh afterward or stray fibers will show as threads in the finished cubes.
- Essence of anchovyA thin, salty anchovy extract once sold bottled. Anchovy paste thinned with a few drops of water is the closest thing on a modern shelf; the recipe asks for only a few drops, so keep it to a trace.
- SaltingBetween the anchovy, the celery salt and the stock, the mixture is already salty. Season lightly.
- Cutting and yieldChill the custard fully before unmoulding — warm, it tears. Cut with a knife dipped in hot water into cubes of about a quarter inch. The batch yields enough garnish for four to six cups of clear soup, and the cubes should be added to the hot bowls at the last moment, not simmered.
- Why it sits in this chapterThe recipe appears under soups made without stock yet calls for White Stock, presumably because it is an accompaniment rather than a stockless soup itself -- a plain broth or even milk will substitute if you have none.
This is a royale — in French kitchen parlance a garniture à la royale, a firm savory custard baked in a bain-marie, chilled, and cut into small dice, rounds or diamonds to float in clear consommé. The technique belongs to the nineteenth-century French repertoire that American cooking schools were busy translating for domestic use, and its appeal in a household manual is obvious: it turns the leftover breast of a boiled fowl into something that looks deliberate in a soup plate. The bottled essence of anchovy called for here was a standard Anglo-American seasoning of the period, sold alongside mushroom ketchup and Worcestershire as a way of adding savor — what we would now call umami — without adding visible color. That a book aimed at ordinary housekeepers expected them to mould, chill and dice a garnish says a good deal about how formally a turn-of-the-century dinner was still meant to be served.