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Chicken Custard
Put one breakfast cupful each of chicken stock and cream into a saucepan and boil; then pour them over the yolks of three well-beaten eggs, put them into the bain-marie, add a little salt, and cook until the mixture thickens a little. Let it get cold, put it into custard cups, and serve.
A savoury custard in the crème anglaise mould — thickened on the stove rather than baked, then chilled. Three points decide whether it works: the heat, the straining, and the seasoning.
- Breakfast cupfulA breakfast cup is larger than a teacup, generally taken as 8 to 10 fl oz. Use 1 cup (240 ml) each of stock and cream and the ratio to three yolks holds.
- Bain-marieHere it means a bowl or pan set over simmering water, not a water bath in the oven. Keep the water below a boil; direct heat from a rolling boil will scramble the yolks against the side of the bowl.
- The hinge — temperatureThe mixture thickens at about 175-180F (80-82C) and curdles a few degrees above. Stir constantly with a spatula, watch for the custard to coat the back of a spoon, and pull it off the heat the moment it does.
- Temper, then strainThe recipe simply says to pour the boiling stock and cream over the beaten yolks; do it in a thin stream while whisking. Straining through a fine sieve before the mixture goes into the cups is not in the original, but it catches any threads of set egg and the chalazae.
- What it sets likeThree yolks to two cups of liquid gives a pouring custard, not a sliceable one. Chilled, it firms to the consistency of a thick sauce. If you want a custard that holds a spoon-shape, that is a different, baked preparation with whole eggs.
- Seasoning"A little salt" is doing real work: unsweetened dairy and stock taste flat without it. Season the hot liquid before it meets the yolks, taste again when cold, and add white pepper or a scrape of nutmeg if the stock is weak. Chilling dulls salt, so season slightly forward.
- Stock qualityThe dish is mostly stock, so it tastes of whatever you use. A well-reduced, properly gelatinous chicken stock gives body and helps the set; a thin or over-salty commercial broth will show immediately.
- Yield and keepingAbout four small custard cups. Cover and refrigerate; eat within two days, as it is a lightly cooked egg-and-cream preparation with no sugar or acid to protect it.
Savoury custards run through late nineteenth-century cookery in two guises: as invalid food, where a chicken-and-cream custard was the sort of thing prescribed for someone who could not manage solid meat, and as royale, the unsweetened custard baked firm, cut into diamonds or rounds and floated in clear consommé. The technique is the same one behind crème anglaise, with stock standing in for the sugar and vanilla, and it belongs to a period when cooks moved fluidly between sweet and savoury uses of the same custard base.