Home › Menu XV › Chicken Timbale Salad
Chicken Timbale Salad
Mix one cup of chopped chicken with half a cup of grape-fruit pulp and half a cup of diced canned pineapple. Dissolve a chicken bouillon cube in half a cup of boiling water and add a tablespoonful of vinegar, salt and pepper to taste. Soak a tablespoonful of gelatin in a quarter cup of cold water, add it to the vinegar and bouillon and stir until the gelatin is dissolved. When cool, add slowly half a cup of mayonnaise, beating it well.
Now add the fruit and chicken. Put into oiled timbale molds and chill. Unmold and arrange on a platter with shredded celery, that has been marinated in French dressing. Decorate with mayonnaise.
A molded gelatin salad of the sort that filled American warm-weather menus between the wars. Nothing here is difficult, but the set is delicate and two ingredient choices decide whether it works.
- Keep the pineapple cannedFresh pineapple contains bromelain, a protease that digests gelatin and leaves the mixture soupy no matter how long it chills. Canned pineapple has been heated enough to deactivate it. The same caution applies to fresh papaya and kiwi.
- Gelatin quantityA tablespoonful is roughly one modern envelope of powdered gelatin, 1/4 oz or 7 g, which normally sets about 2 cups of liquid. Here it carries about 1 1/4 cups of bouillon, water and mayonnaise plus about 2 cups of solids, so the set should be firm enough to unmold.
- The hinge: temperature when the mayonnaise goes in"When cool" means about room temperature and slightly syrupy, not chilled. Too warm and the mayonnaise thins and separates; too cold and the gelatin sets in threads as you beat. Add it in a slow stream while whisking.
- Grapefruit pulpSectioned grapefruit with the membrane and pith removed, broken up rather than juiced. Drain it well; excess juice both dilutes the gelatin and adds acid that can slacken the set.
- Timbale moldsSmall straight-sided cylindrical molds of about ½ cup. Ramekins, a muffin tin, or teacups all work. Brush with a neutral oil in a thin film, not a coating, or the surface goes greasy on unmolding.
- ChickenCooked chicken, chopped small — poached breast or leftover roast. About 5 oz of meat gives a cup chopped.
- French dressingIn a book of this period this means a plain vinaigrette of oil and vinegar with salt, pepper and often a little paprika or dry mustard, not the sweet orange bottled dressing sold under the name today.
- Chilling, yield and holdingAt least 4 hours; overnight is better and unmolds more cleanly. The quantities fill six or so 1/2-cup timbales. Being a mayonnaise-and-poultry salad, it should go back into the refrigerator promptly and not sit out on a buffet.
The timbale takes its name from the French timbale, which denotes both a metal drinking cup and a kettledrum; in cookery it describes the shape of the mold rather than anything about the filling. By the 1920s and 1930s the word in American cookbooks had drifted from the old hot forcemeat preparations to any small molded thing, often a cold gelatin one, and books aimed at hot-weather cooking leaned on them: a dish assembled from a can, a bouillon cube, jarred mayonnaise and a box of gelatin, set in the mechanical refrigerator that was spreading through middle-class kitchens. The grapefruit is a period marker too — Florida and Texas growers were promoting the fruit in these decades, and it turns up in savory salads far more often than a modern cook would expect. The combination of poultry, mayonnaise and sweet fruit in aspic reads oddly now, but it followed a logic the era took for granted: a chilled, sliceable, self-garnishing luncheon dish that could be made in the cool of the morning and required no stove at noon.