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Crab Meat in Timbale Cases
8 Timbale cases. 2 cups crab meat. 3 tablespoons butter. 3 tablespoons flour.
Yolks 2 eggs. 1 tablespoon onion finely chopped.
Salt, pepper, paprika.
Few grains each cayenne, mustard and nutmeg. 2 cups hot thin cream.
PROCESS: Melt butter in a sauce pan, add onion and cook five minutes without browning, stirring constantly. Add flour and stir until well blended. Add hot cream gradually, continue stirring, add seasoning to taste. Remove from range and add egg yolks slightly beaten. Reheat crab meat in sauce (over hot water). Serve in Swedish Timbales. 1 cup flour. ½ teaspoon salt. 1 teaspoon sugar.
A classic white-sauce creamed crab, served in the crisp fried shells known as Swedish timbales. The recipe is written for a cook who already owns a timbale iron, and the last three ingredients are the beginning of the batter for those shells rather than part of the filling.
- The hinge: never boil after the yolks go inThe pan comes off the heat before the beaten yolks are stirred in, and the crab is warmed over hot water rather than direct flame. Take the sauce above a simmer at this point and the yolks curdle into threads.
- Those last three ingredientsThe cup of flour, 1½ teaspoons salt and teaspoon sugar appear to be the start of the timbale-case batter rather than part of the filling; a rosette batter of this kind is typically completed with about an egg, a cup of milk and a spoonful of oil. They are not stirred into the crab sauce.
- Timbale casesThese are not baked custard moulds but thin fried shells made on a timbale or rosette iron dipped in batter and lowered into hot fat. Store-bought filo or puff-pastry shells, or good vol-au-vent cases, stand in perfectly well.
- Thin creamPeriod "thin cream" is roughly today's half-and-half, around 12 percent fat. Whole milk works and gives a lighter sauce; modern heavy cream at 36 percent will make the filling heavy and may break when reheated.
- Crab meatTwo cups is roughly 8 to 12 oz depending on how loosely it is packed. Lump or backfin crab suits the dish; pick it over for shell and cartilage, and fold it in at the end so the lumps stay whole.
- "Few grains"An eighth of a teaspoon or less of each of the cayenne, dry mustard and nutmeg. The mustard and nutmeg are there to lift the cream, not to be tasted individually.
- Egg safetyThe sauce is thickened off the heat and then only warmed over hot water, so the yolks may never reach 160F. Use pasteurized eggs, or return the finished sauce briefly to gentle heat and check with a thermometer before it thickens further.
- YieldEight filled cases. As a lunch dish it will serve about four.
Creamed shellfish in a fried shell was a fixture of American company cooking in the earlier twentieth century, when a hostess was expected to produce something delicate before the roast. The iron itself, a shaped metal form on a long handle, is generally traced to Scandinavian rosette baking, which is why English-language cookbooks of the period call the results "Swedish timbales" even when the filling is thoroughly Anglo-American. Crab meat had become practical for inland kitchens by then through canning and improved rail shipment from the Chesapeake and the Gulf.