Home › Vegetarian Dishes › Timbale Molds
Timbale Molds
1 teaspoonful melted Crisco 3/4 cupful flour 1 egg 1/2 teaspoonful salt 1/2 cupful milk Sift flour and salt into bowl, add egg well beaten, milk and Crisco. Beat five minutes then strain into cup. Have kettle of Crisco on fire and heat until cube of bread will become golden brown in sixty seconds. Heat timbale iron in hot Crisco, let stand two or three minutes, then drain and dip into batter to half inch of top of iron; submerge in Crisco and fry until batter is crisp and lightly browned. Remove from iron and drain on paper. If batter does not cling to iron, then iron is not hot enough. If Crisco sizzles considerably, and batter case spreads out and drops from the iron, mold is too hot. If iron is lowered too far into batter the case will come over top of iron and be difficult to remove. Creamed dishes of all kinds can be served in these cases. Cold custards, cooked vegetables, fruits or ices may be also served in the cases.
Sufficient for forty cases.
These are rosette or timbale cases — thin fried shells formed on a heated iron — and the whole technique hinges on iron temperature. Everything else in the recipe is a simple crêpe batter.
- The hinge: iron temperatureThe iron must be hot enough that batter sets on contact but not so hot that it repels the batter. The original's troubleshooting is accurate: batter sliding off means too hot, batter refusing to cling means too cold. Return the iron to the fat briefly between cases, and expect the first case or two to be wasted while you find the temperature.
- Fat temperature in numbersA bread cube browning in sixty seconds is roughly 365–375°F. Use a thermometer; below 350°F the shells absorb fat and go limp, above 385°F they colour before they crisp.
- CriscoCrisco was new when this book was written and the book exists to sell it. Any neutral oil or shortening with a high smoke point will do the same job. The teaspoonful in the batter is there for tenderness and can be melted butter or oil.
- Beat five minutes, then restProlonged beating can toughen the shells. Whisk only until smooth, strain to catch lumps as directed, then let the batter stand about half an hour so it hydrates and thins slightly. It should be roughly the consistency of heavy cream.
- Depth of the dipDip to within half an inch of the iron's top rim, as written. Batter over the rim locks the shell onto the iron and it will tear coming off.
- Draining and holdingDrain on paper, hollow side down, then invert. The cases will keep a while in an airtight tin and can be re-crisped briefly in a low oven. Fill only at the moment of serving or they soften quickly.
- YieldForty cases from this quantity of batter implies a small iron making very small shells. A larger modern timbale or rosette iron will give you correspondingly fewer.
A Calendar of Dinners was written by Marion Harris Neil and published by Procter & Gamble, which is why Crisco appears in a batter that needs only a teaspoonful of fat: the book is a menu planner and a promotional vehicle for a shortening P&G introduced in 1911. Timbale irons themselves are older and belong to a European family of decorative pastries made on shaped irons, among them the Scandinavian rosett, formed by heating the iron, coating it in thin batter and frying the batter off the mould. In American cookery of this period the plain cup-shaped case was a common way to serve creamed chicken, sweetbreads or peas in individual portions without the labour of pastry. The irons were widely sold and appear in household manuals of the 1900s and 1910s; they fell out of use as service styles simplified, though the fluted rosette version survives in Scandinavian-American Christmas baking.