4.28.09
For two of us, Robyn and myself, the ghost of George Scharf hangs over the dinner. Less an assemblage of Victorian dishes, this is for me at least a meal that serves as a tribute to him and to the snobbery that would recoil at every turn from my dining room (too small), my account books (nonexistent) and my kitchen (unrecognizable). But George’s snobbery is for me of a particular kind, a kind of ordinary snobbery that resists and rises above markers of individuality. So when I imagine him at this feast, he is not so much a ghost from Macbeth as someone, something more akin to Casper: soft of outline, oddly pokeable, and friendly in a kind of scary way. He is also, unlike Banquo, too polite to bleed or indeed to serve efficiently as a reminder of past sins or even, really, inadequacies. One speaks, as I did at the beginning of this entry, of ghosts “hanging over” events, or as in later in this entry, as sitting down. Scharf’s ghost is by contrast a stand-up sort of spirit, although I always see him standing in the corner and out of the corner of my eye.
5.4.09
Preparing for the dinner was a balancing act between verisimilitude and the desire to produce good food. It is not that I doubted that the Victorian recipes could produce delicious things, but that they were on some basic level illegible to me. As a lifelong reader of cookbooks who reads recipes like novels, or perhaps more accurately like director reads scripts, I count on the ability to imagine both the steps and the final product. The Victorian recipes, even those who followed modern requirements like precise measurement, did not activate that ability in me.
Take two very different clashes between my experiences of cooking and the recipes, both necessary to produce the Consommé Royale that opened the banquet. I have often made consommé and love how it looks in the cup, how it lets the diner look at and appreciate the cup. I love the grungy process of clarification I tend to use, whereby egg white and raw meat get dumped into nice broth and swell into a pasty gray ugliness as the consommé below gets clear and clearer, more and more beautiful. I love pulling the clear golden soup up through the “chimney”—the the wonderfully named hole in the wonderfully named egg and meat “raft.”
When I turned to the Escoffier recipe for consommé, I understood the general process. What was in my way were hours of doing it my own way. Escoffier, like the true Victorian cookery-book writers, calls for what would seem to modern-day cooks huge quantities of meat (Soyer tosses off a figure of 16 pounds (GR p.53) for a dinner party’s worth. Even chicken consommé is meaty. Escoffier requires beef as well as chicken in what he says will be a “golden” chicken consommé. The raft was to be made of browned whole “skeletons” of chicken, “pounded”—a favorite Victorian kitchen word, it seems--into a pulp. I did in fact brown and pound, although I did it half-heartedly, with a half chicken, and without belief. I also added egg shells to the raft for no better reason than that I had read about this possibility in an English mystery novel (not at all Victorian) in which a woman is hypnotized into killing her wife’s lover by producing a menu of foods to which she is allergic. A later peep into Soyer’s instructions for clarification justified my method .Soyer advises using both shells and whites. “This is a new mode of clarification and cannot fail,” he says simply. The egg shells, although not Escoffier-genuine, were really quite wonderful addition, making the raft something of a mosaic as it floated around attracting impurities.
The second recipe with which I struggled was that for the “royale” to be placed, as far as I could tell, in the soup bowl before consommé was poured over it. Choosing—and naming--“Consommé Royale” was ready a little bit of a cheat, since, as I noted above, I was not including the nano-vegetable dice of the Prinatiere part of “consommé Printaniere Royale.”
Before I began this process, I had never heard of a royale, and Escoffier, the only person to mention it, was somewhat vague about what they were supposed to look (and taste) like. Made with cream, eggs, and in this case chicken (pounded of course) they sounded something like the flans I had made in a spiced broth for Christmas. Like the flans, they could be made in large or small molds. Escoffier suggested dariole molds, compellingly pictured on the inside page of his cookbook, but unavialble at the tonier Houston kitchen stores. Had I planned better, of course, I could have ordered them on the internet, where a helpful site infomed me that Dariole molds were “used a century ago to make "Darioles", liqueur-drenched cream horns, but now more familiar for making Castle Puddings, and individual steamed sponges.” Shaped like cylinders, the molds can apparently be almost any size, and currently come with a useful “quick-release” finish. Perhaps for the next banquet, or the next (first) Castle Pudding.
Escoffier noted that small royales could be left alone, while large ones, should be sliced and “stamped” decoratively. I tried and failed to imagine a flan that would take the impress of a stamp, but the decorative element, missing in the pictures of dariole molds on the net, was irresistible. In the end, Robyn happened across some tiny decorative molds, about an inch across; when we compared them to the pictures in our Victorian sources these were called petit four molds. While we could also not imagine molded petit fours, this was clearly not our problem—that day.
Robyn and I stayed up late at night experimenting with steaming the proto-royales. Despite Escoffier’s instructions, it was impossible to poach anything in our tiny little molds. Our first try produced little omelet-like objects which, to our delighted surprise, retained some of the details from the molds. The next morning, dissatisfied with the taste (bland) and consistency (rubbery) of the omelets, I experimented with various levels of egginess and with different quantities of our great golden-yolked farmer’s market eggs (very Victorian or not at all?). After several tries, I came up with objects appealingly moussy that still held their shapes. We seemed to have royales, or at least something cute and good that we could refer to by that name to other people who had never heard of them. It was at that moment that we allowed ourselves to become Darwinian, eating or otherwise disposing of the boring squares and ovals, and keeping the walnuts, the flowers, and the layered arabesques that bordered a little too much on the deco. Each one was exactly the right size to fit cunningly in the bottom of my white and gold Shelly consommé cups that had laid unused and forgotten in my cupboard for many years. We had crossed over from historical authenticity to the twee and took great pleasure in it.
I should say that all this would have been easier if I had leaned more heavily on the internet for research. While happy to look through Victorianist internet sources, it literally never occurred to me that contemporary sources on Royales would be available. In other words, I had a blinding investment in the Victorian (or early twentieth-century) identity of Royales. After the banquet a quick and dirty Google search under “consommé royale” offered the following insight:
While many consommes are garnished with neatly cut vegetables, other garnishes are also of great importance. They are Royales and Quenelles. Royales are savory custards, poached and finely cut. The recipe for royale custards is simple. By volume, half egg and half liquid. I might better say two quarters egg and two quarters liquid. For example, for a perfectly white royale, 1/2 egg white, 1/2 milk, seasoned and strained into a buttered custard cup set in water and baked at 350 F till a silver knife comes out clean. (Very important not to boil royales, we want NO bubbles in them.) When cooled the royale is unmolded, it is carefully sliced or diced, and the cuts are held in cold water. For a very yellow royale, 1/2 egg yolks and 1/2 heavy cream that has had cooked carrots puréed in it when hot, and strained. Some consommes may have a number of different color royales (I stop at 3) each in a different shape. I have also used tofu as a royale. Royales should be well seasoned, and well strained, and it is important for their texture to be smooth as silk." (http://www.globalgourmet.com/food/egg/egg0397/eggsalad.html)
While the entry did not talk about stamping, it would have helped me to imagine the taste and texture for which I was aiming. But I was, I suppose, invested in royales as things of the past, I did not think about, did not want to think about, royales persisting into present day menus with the more familiar (although equally tricky) quenelles.
