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Egg Custard
Yolks 2 eggs. Few grains salt 2 tablespoons milk Beat eggs slightly, add milk and salt. Pour into small buttered cup, place in pan of hot water, and bake until firm; cool, remove from cup, and cut in fancy shapes with French vegetable cutters.
This is not a dessert custard but a soup garnish — the firm baked egg that French kitchens call royale, cut into diamonds and floated in clear soup. It is a two-ingredient recipe, so the technique is all there is.
- The egg count is missingAs transcribed, the ingredient line gives only salt and 2 tablespoons milk; the number of eggs has dropped out. The method says "beat eggs," so more than one may have been called for. A common proportion for a custard of this kind is 1 egg (or 2 yolks) to 2 tablespoons milk, which sets firm enough to cut and handle.
- Oven and water bathThe recipe gives no temperature; a moderate oven (in modern terms somewhere around 325F) and no hotter suits it. The point of the pan of hot water is to keep the custard below the temperature at which egg proteins squeeze out their liquid; if the water simmers, the custard goes porous and weeps and will crumble under the cutter.
- "Until firm" in numbersIn a small cup, roughly 20 to 30 minutes. It is done when the center no longer trembles as a unit and a knife tip comes out clean. Overbaked custard cuts raggedly.
- Butter the cup properlyThe whole recipe depends on turning out one unbroken slab. Butter the cup thoroughly, and cool the custard completely before unmoulding — warm custard tears.
- Shape of the vesselA shallow, straight-sided cup or a small ramekin gives a slab of even thickness, which is what you want for cutting. Something deep and tapered gives a wedge that cuts unevenly.
- If you have no vegetable cuttersAspic or small canapé cutters do the same job. Failing those, turn out the slab, slice it about a quarter inch thick, and cut it into diamonds or narrow strips with a thin knife.
- Yield and useAdd the shapes to the hot soup at the moment of serving; held in the tureen they soften and break up.
Custard royale belongs to the nineteenth-century French repertoire of garnishes for clear soups, where the interest of a consomme lay in what was floated in it: shredded pancake, tiny quenelles, or these little cut shapes of baked egg. Such garnishes belong to a period when even a plain soup was expected to arrive at the table looking composed, and when small tinned tools -- French vegetable cutters, aspic cutters, sets of fluted rounds -- were within reach of American housekeepers.