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Egg Timbales (Tablespoon butter tablespoon)
1 tablespoon butter 1 tablespoon flour 2/3 cup milk 3 eggs 1 tablespoon chopped parsley 1/2 teaspoon salt 1/8 teaspoon pepper Few grains celery salt Few grains cayenne Make a sauce of the butter, flour, and milk; add yolks beaten until thick and lemon-colored, then add seasonings. Beat whites of eggs until stiff and dry, and cut and fold into first mixture. Turn into buttered moulds, set in pan of hot water, and bake in a slow oven until firm. Serve with Tomato Cream Sauce ]]]]] Egg Croquettes 6 eggs 2 tablespoons butter 1 slice onion 1/3 cup flour 1 cup white stock Salt Pepper Yolks 3 eggs Stale bread crumbs Grated cheese Poach eggs and dry on a towel. Cook butter with onion three minutes. Add flour and, gradually, stock. Season with salt and pepper; then add yolks of eggs slightly beaten. Cook one minute, and cool. Cover eggs with mixture, roll in bread crumbs and cheese, using equal parts, dip in egg, again roll in crumbs, fry in deep fat, and drain on brown paper. These may be served with a thin sauce, using equal parts of white stock and cream, and seasoning with grated cheese, salt, and paprika.
A basic thick white sauce lightened with beaten whites and baked gently in a water bath — closer to a savoury souffle-custard than to a firm loaf. Everything depends on keeping the oven low.
- Slow ovenRead this as 300-325F. Any hotter and the timbales puff, then weep and collapse as the egg protein tightens.
- MouldsTimbale moulds were small metal cups, usually straight-sided, commonly somewhere around 1/3 to 1/2 cup capacity. Buttered 4 oz ramekins or a muffin tin work; this quantity fills about four, serving three or four as a light entree.
- Water bathUse hot, not boiling, water reaching halfway up the moulds, and keep it below a simmer. A pad of folded paper or a towel under the moulds stops the bottoms from setting first.
- DonenessReckon 25-35 minutes depending on mould size. They are firm when the centre no longer trembles and a knife inserted at the edge comes out clean, around 170F internally; the surface will look matte.
- The sauce baseOne tablespoon each butter and flour to 2/3 cup milk gives a fairly thin bechamel. Cook the flour a full minute before adding milk, and let the sauce cool to warm before the yolks go in or they will scramble in streaks.
- Folding"Cut and fold" is the period phrase for what we still call folding: cut down through the mixture with the edge of a spatula and turn it over rather than stirring. Do it in two additions, sacrificing the first spoonful of whites to loosen the base.
- UnmouldingLet the baked timbales stand 2-3 minutes, then run a thin knife round and invert onto warm plates. Straight from the oven they are too fragile to turn out cleanly.
- Tomato Cream SauceThe accompaniment is a separate recipe elsewhere in the book — a thin tomato puree finished with cream or folded into white sauce. Any light tomato-cream sauce serves the purpose; the timbales themselves are mild and want the acidity.
Timbales take their name from the French timbale, a drum-shaped cup, and by the late nineteenth century the word covered both the mould and anything baked in it — chicken, fish, spinach, rice or, as here, eggs. Cooking-school books of the period used them a great deal; one likely attraction was that they turned a small quantity of an expensive ingredient into a neat individual portion, and a water bath gave gentle, forgiving heat in a coal or early gas range. Books of this generation typically group them with souffles and puddings under egg cookery, since all three depend on the same two operations: a flour-thickened milk base, and whites beaten stiff to lift it.