Filling
1 cup cream 1 teaspoon butter 2 tablespoons Gold Medal flour 1 teaspoon salt 1/8 teaspoon pepper 3 cups diced chicken 1/2 cup sliced mushrooms Butter the moulds with cold butter, dot the bottom and sides with tiny dice of truffle and line them with the forcemeat, (take care to have the lining thin at the bottom of the mould and thick around the top, or it will break when turned out).
Fill the moulds to within three-quarters inch of the top with the creamed preparation, and cover with the forcemeat. Place the moulds in a deep pan and pour in hot water to fill almost to the top of the moulds. Cover with a buttered paper and cook in a slow oven for twenty-five minutes. The water must not boil. Serve with Bechamel or Yellow Sauce.
This is the filling and assembly for chicken timbales — the forcemeat lining is given elsewhere in the book, so read this as one half of a two-part dish. The critical point is heat control: this is a custard-set mousseline, not a braise.
- The water must not boilThe original says so explicitly, and it is the hinge. Once the bain-marie simmers, the forcemeat lining curdles and weeps and the timbales collapse when unmoulded. Hold the water at roughly 170–180F; start it hot from the kettle and keep the oven low rather than topping up with boiling water.
- "Slow oven"Usually reckoned at about 300–325F. At that temperature a 25-minute bake points to small individual moulds; larger moulds will need longer, judged by a centre that is set and springs back rather than by the clock.
- The creamed preparationThe first five ingredients are a cream sauce: melt the butter, cook the flour in it briefly, add the cream and cook until it coats a spoon heavily, then fold in the chicken and mushrooms. Two tablespoons flour to a cup of cream gives a sauce on the thick side of medium — a loose sauce will soak into the forcemeat.
- Chicken and mushrooms"Diced chicken" here means cooked chicken, the meat off a boiled or roasted bird; the 25 minutes in a barely-simmering water bath will not cook raw poultry through. Sauté the sliced mushrooms in a little butter first to drive off their water, or the filling will thin out in the oven.
- TruffleDotting the mould with truffle dice is decorative — the pieces show as dark spots on the turned-out timbale. A very small amount of tinned black truffle does the job; thinly sliced black olive or a dot of blanched dark mushroom gives the same visual effect at no cost.
- Buttered paperA round of buttered parchment laid directly on the moulds. It keeps steam off the surface without sealing the pan, which is what a tight lid of foil would do — trapped steam raises the temperature and works against the whole point of the water bath.
- Moulds and unmouldingSmall metal dariole moulds or ramekins. Rest them 3–5 minutes out of the water before turning out, run a thin knife round the top edge, and invert onto a warm plate. The instruction to keep the lining thin at the bottom and thick at the rim is what allows the timbale to hold its shape at the point of most stress.
- Yield and sauceProbably six to eight small timbales, served as an entrée in the older sense — a course before the roast. "Yellow sauce" in cookery of this period generally means a Béchamel or velouté finished with egg yolks; make it while the moulds bake and keep it off direct heat so it does not scramble.
Timbales like this one belong to the Anglo-American reading of French service that dominated hotel and club cooking around 1900: a forcemeat-lined mould, a creamed filling of cooked meat, a bain-marie, and a white sauce poured round. The name comes from the French timbale, a drum, after the shape of the mould. That such a dish appears in a flour company's promotional cookbook says a good deal about the period — Gold Medal's booklets were distributed to sell flour, and the recipe calls for two tablespoons of it to thicken the cream. Alongside biscuits and pie crust, here was the kind of composed entrée a home cook would have met in a restaurant.