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Cocoanut Timbals
3 eggs 1/2 teaspoon salt 2 cups Dromedary Cocoanut 2 tablespoons lemon juice 3 pimientos 1 1/2 cups milk Paprika 1 cup milk 2 tablespoons butter 1/2 teaspoon salt Cheese Sauce ¼ cup grated cheese 2 tablespoons flour Beat the eggs, add milk, pimientos which have been put through a sieve and cocoanut chopped very fine. Bake in buttered molds surrounded by water, for about 25 minutes. Serve with cheese sauce.
A savory baked custard, not a dessert, and the ingredient list as printed runs the timbal and the sauce together in one column. Sorting the two lists out first is most of the work.
- Splitting the two listsThe timbals evidently take 3 eggs, 2 cups coconut, 3 pimientos, 1 1/2 cups milk and one of the two 1/2 teaspoons of salt. The remainder — 2 tablespoons butter, 2 tablespoons flour, 1 cup milk, the grated cheese, the second 1/2 teaspoon salt and the paprika — makes a plain béchamel with cheese. The lemon juice and paprika are printed with the first group and the book gives no method for the sauce at all, so their placement is guesswork.
- "14 cup grated cheese"An obvious typesetting slip for 1/4 cup. The book does not say which cheese; a dry, sharp one will carry better, as a mild one tends to disappear behind the coconut and pimiento.
- Dromedary CocoanutPackaged shredded coconut of the period was generally unsweetened. Modern sweetened flaked coconut will make the custard taste like a mistake — use unsweetened desiccated or shredded coconut, and chop it fine as directed so it suspends rather than mats.
- Oven temperatureThe original gives none. An egg custard in a water bath wants 325–350F; hotter and it curdles and weeps whatever the water bath is doing.
- Timbal moldsSmall straight-sided molds of about 4 to 6 ounces — ramekins or custard cups. Butter them, set them in a pan, and pour in boiling water to come halfway up the sides. Twenty-five minutes suits that size; larger molds will need 40 minutes or more.
- Judging donenessBake until the centers are just set and a knife inserted off-center comes out clean. A custard that is firm all the way through at the middle has already overcooked, and unmolding will tear it.
- PimientosJarred sweet red peppers, sieved to a smooth purée as the recipe says. Drain them well first; the packing liquid will thin the custard enough to matter.
- YieldThe recipe gives no yield; the quantities suggest roughly six small timbals, or four generous ones. Serve hot, unmolded, with the sauce spooned over.
Dromedary was the shredded-coconut and date brand of the Hills Brothers Company of New York, and this booklet is a promotional cookbook of the sort food manufacturers issued by the thousand in the early twentieth century to persuade cooks that a familiar ingredient belonged in unfamiliar places — hence a coconut custard served under cheese sauce. The timbale takes its name from the French for a drum, after the shape of the small straight-sided mold it is baked in; timbales of chicken, sweetbreads, spinach or cheese were standard genteel luncheon fare in American cookbooks of the 1890s through the 1920s, valued because they arrived at the table in neat individual portions. Pimiento and paprika appear here for the same reason they appear all over American recipes of the period: canned Spanish sweet peppers had become cheap and widely available, and they supplied color to a dish that would otherwise be uniformly pale.