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Corn Timbales
Score six ears of sweet corn and press out the pulp. To one cup add one tablespoon of butter melted, half teaspoon of salt, one-fourth teaspoon of Hungarian paprika, the beaten yolks of three eggs, then the stiffly-beaten whites and one tablespoon of flour; butter corn timbale molds, then fill with the mixture two-thirds full; set in a pan of water and place in hot oven; bake until firm; unmold onto a hot plate. -See Page XX.
A savory corn custard baked in a water bath — closer to a small soufflé than to the molded rice timbales the name usually suggests. Two things in the original need adjusting: the oven and the assumption that you own timbale molds.
- Ignore "hot oven"Period cookbooks generally meant something in the region of 400F or above by a hot oven, which risks curdling an egg custard even in a water bath. Bake at 325–350F instead; the water bath moderates the heat but does not protect against a genuinely hot oven.
- MoldsTimbale molds were small tinned cups, commonly around 1/2 cup capacity. Use 4 oz ramekins, small custard cups or a buttered muffin tin. Leaving them two-thirds full gives the beaten whites room to lift the mixture as it sets.
- Scoring the cornRun a knife tip down the center of each row of kernels to split them, then scrape the pulp and milk out with the back of the blade, leaving the tough hulls on the cob. Six ears gives roughly 1 1/2 to 2 cups of pulp; the recipe uses only one cup, so a smaller batch of very fresh corn will do.
- Frozen cornOff-season, pulse thawed corn kernels briefly in a food processor with a spoonful of their liquid and pass through a coarse sieve. It is thinner than scraped pulp, so drain the excess liquid or the custards will weep.
- Order of mixingFold the flour in with the whites, not before them, and stop as soon as no streaks remain. Beating the flour into the yolk base makes a heavier, more pudding-like timbale.
- Water bathPour boiling water into the pan to come halfway up the molds and set the pan on a folded towel or a rack, not the bare oven floor.
- Doneness and timingFigure 25 to 35 minutes for 4 oz molds. They are done when the centers barely jiggle and a knife slid in comes out clean; overbaked corn custard turns grainy and pulls away from the sides.
- UnmoldingLet them stand five minutes out of the water before turning out — straight from the bath they are too fragile. Run a thin knife around the edge first.
- YieldOne cup of pulp makes four to six small timbales: a side dish for four, or a light supper course with tomato sauce or creamed mushrooms.
The timbale — whose name is generally traced to the French for a kettledrum, after the shape of the mold, though the French word also means a metal drinking cup and reaches French via Spanish atabal from Arabic al-tabl, so the cup may be the truer source — was one of the great markers of aspirational American cooking around 1900, a way of serving humble material in individual portions that looked like restaurant work. Corn was the obvious candidate: sweet corn scraped from the cob was cheap and abundant in late summer, and the pulp already carries enough starch to set with very little help. The call for "Hungarian paprika" specifically is a period detail; imported sweet paprika seems to have been newly fashionable in American kitchens at the turn of the century, and cookbooks named its origin much as they named French mustard. The instruction to score the ears rather than cut the kernels off whole is the older, more painstaking method, and it is the reason this custard tastes of corn milk instead of corn.