Egg Timbale
Six eggs beaten slightly, one level teaspoon of salt, one shake of pepper for each egg, one-half pepperspoon of red pepper, one and one-quarter cups of milk, a little onion juice. Put in small cups in dipper and pour boiling water around. Bake from five to seven minutes in hot oven. Turn into shallow dish.
Sauce: One-half can of tomatoes, four saltspoons of mixed pickle spice, one bunch of thyme, one block of sugar (loaf), one-half teaspoon of salt. Let cook until pulp of tomato is soft and will pour through a sieve. To this add one heaping tablespoon of flour and cook two minutes in a tablespoon of butter and a little lemon juice. -Mrs Edgar E.
Bartlett, Rockford.
A baked savory egg custard, unmoulded and sauced. The proportions are sound; the oven heat and the baking time as printed are not.
- The hinge: gentle heatEgg custard sets around 170 to 180F and curdles if pushed much above that. Bake the cups in their water bath at about 325F rather than the "hot oven" of the original; period definitions of a "hot oven" vary from source to source, but generally fall somewhere around 400-450F.
- Five to seven minutes is wrongSix eggs and 1¼ cups of milk in individual cups need roughly 25 to 35 minutes in a water bath before the centers are just set with a slight wobble. The short time in the original only makes sense for a much shallower, thinner custard, if at all.
- "Dipper"An ambiguous word here, possibly a dripping pan. The likeliest reading is that the cups go into a deep pan and boiling water is poured around them, a bain-marie. Any roasting pan will do.
- Small spoonsA saltspoon is usually reckoned at about 1/4 teaspoon; a pepperspoon was not a standardised measure, though it is generally taken as no larger than a saltspoon. "One shake of pepper for each egg" is a cook's gesture, not a measure -- start with 1/4 teaspoon ground black pepper for the whole batch.
- A block of loaf sugarLoaf sugar was broken from a cone or moulded into small blocks; one block is about a teaspoon. It is there to take the edge off the canned tomato, not to sweeten the sauce.
- Half a can of tomatoesPeriod canned tomatoes came in several sizes, so "half a can" is imprecise; reckon on roughly 1 to 1 1/2 cups of tomatoes with their juice. Canned crushed tomatoes work directly.
- Building the sauceAs written the flour goes in after the sieved tomato, which will lump. Cook the tablespoon of flour in the tablespoon of butter for two minutes first, then whisk in the strained tomato and finish with lemon juice.
- Spice and thymeMixed pickle spice is a whole-spice blend, typically including mustard seed, coriander, allspice, bay and chili, though blends varied. Tie it and the thyme in cloth or a tea ball so they come out before sieving.
- YieldSix eggs in small cups gives four to six timbales, enough for four as a light supper or luncheon dish.
Timbale in French is often glossed as a kettledrum, though the word also names a drinking cup, and by extension it came to mean the small straight-sided mould that gives these custards their shape; through the second half of the nineteenth century the word covered everything from pastry cases filled with creamed meat to plain baked egg custards turned out of a cup. The savory egg timbale earned its place in American cookery because it stretched a few eggs into a company dish, and it turns up often in luncheon menus of the period alongside creamed chicken and salads. The tomato sauce, built on canned tomatoes and a commercial pickle-spice blend, dates this squarely to the era when canned goods had become respectable in middle-class kitchens. The attribution to Mrs. Edgar E. Bartlett of Rockford marks it as a contributed recipe, the kind collected from local subscribers and written for someone who already knew what the dish should look like.