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Egg Timbale Salad
Take as many eggs as you have people to serve.
Boil them hard, remove the shell and put the eggs through a potato ricer while still warm. Take small timbale molds and pack each tightly with the egg mixture flavored with pepper and salt.
Set in ice box to chill. Peel medium-sized tomatoes by putting them in hot water for a few minutes. Chill the tomatoes. When ready to serve the salad, slice the tomatoes, spread with mayonnaise, unmold the egg timbales, place one on each slice of tomato, garnish top with a sprig of parsley, surround with hearts of lettuce and serve.
A composed luncheon salad that depends entirely on packing the riced egg tightly enough to hold its shape. Everything else is assembly.
- Rice the eggs warmThis is the hinge. Warm yolk and white still carry enough moisture and tack to compress into a solid cylinder; cold eggs crumble and the timbales collapse when unmolded. Shell them as soon as they are cool enough to handle and rice them immediately.
- Hard-boiled, not overboiledTen to twelve minutes at a bare simmer for large eggs, then a brief dip in cold water only long enough to loosen the shells. Longer boiling gives you the grey-green yolk ring and a sulfurous edge that a bland molded salad will not hide.
- Timbale moldsSmall straight-sided cups; the recipe wants one just big enough to hold a single riced egg. Standard muffin cups, ramekins, or espresso cups work; so does a small juice glass. Brush the inside lightly with oil, or line with a square of plastic wrap, and the timbale will drop out cleanly.
- Peeling the tomatoesA few minutes in hot water is longer than needed and softens the flesh. Cut a shallow X in the skin, hold in boiling water 15 to 30 seconds until the skin splits, then move to ice water and slip it off.
- Ice box means the refrigeratorIce box -- an ice-cooled cabinet; use the refrigerator. Chill the packed molds at least an hour so they firm up; two is better. Chill the whole tomatoes at the same time so the finished plate is uniformly cold.
- Season harder than you thinkRiced egg with only salt and pepper is very plain. The book leaves it there, but a little mustard, minced chive, or a spoonful of the mayonnaise worked into the egg makes the timbale taste of something on its own.
- Mayonnaise is the mortarSpread it on the tomato slice, not the egg, and use enough to seat the timbale so it does not slide when the plate is carried.
- Yield and timingOne egg per person, as the recipe says, with a timbale set on each tomato slice. Assemble at the last moment; the egg weeps and the tomato slices water out if the plates sit.
The timbale mold was one of the small workhorses of the late Victorian and early twentieth-century kitchen, a straight-sided cup used to shape everything from chicken forcemeat to rice to custard. By the 1920s and 1930s it had also found a place on the cold side of the menu orcemeats, rice and custards — where the fashion for molded and shaped salads was at its height: aspics, ring molds, stuffed tomatoes and neatly turned-out cylinders of something soft, all set on lettuce and finished with a dab of mayonnaise. This recipe is a good example of the logic behind that style, in which presentation does most of the work and the ingredients are deliberately ordinary. Its instruction to count eggs by heads rather than measure them also marks it as a luncheon dish for a small, known number of guests, the kind of plate a hostess could build ahead and pull cold from the ice box in warm weather, which is exactly the brief a book called Cook and Be Cool sets out to answer.