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Honeycomb Timbale
Boil, in salted water, large-sized macaroni. When cold, cut it into pieces one-quarter of an inch long, making rings. Butter a plain, dome-shaped quart mold and cover it with the rings Make a sauce of one tablespoon each of butter and flour, half a cup each of stock and milk, one-half a teaspoon of salt and a little pepper. Mix with minced chicken or turkey and stir over the fire till the meat is heated. Remove from the range, add three beaten eggs and turn into the lined mold and cover it with a greased paper. Place it in a pan of hot water and poach in a slow oven twenty minutes.
Unmold onto a round dish, garnish with cress and a ring of sauted mushrooms.
A moulded chicken custard lined with macaroni rings, meant to come out of the mould looking like honeycomb. The lining is the whole point, and it is the part most likely to go wrong.
- Line the mould generouslyButter the mould heavily and cold, then press the rings on flat, cut side out, working from the bottom up so each ring overlaps its neighbour. Chilling the lined mould for 20 minutes before filling helps the butter set and hold the pattern during filling.
- "Large-sized macaroni"This means the old straight tubes, wider than the small elbows and sold by weight. Rigatoni or ziti rigati cut into quarter-inch rings gives much the same effect; boil it a minute short of al dente, since it cooks again in the mould.
- Slow ovenRoughly 300-325F in later terms. The custard should never approach a simmer or it will curdle and weep into the pan of water.
- Twenty minutes is shortTwenty minutes may be short -- a full quart mould in a water bath can take considerably longer, though the filling goes in already heated. Judge by feel and temperature rather than the clock: the centre should be set and register about 170-175F, with only the faintest wobble.
- Adding the eggsTake the pan well off the heat and let the mixture drop below scalding before the beaten eggs go in, or they will scramble. The recipe does not state how much minced chicken or turkey to use.
- Water bath and paperHot water should come halfway up the mould. Buttered parchment, buttered side down, replaces the greased paper and keeps a skin from forming.
- UnmouldingRest it 10 minutes out of the water, run a thin knife round the rim, then invert onto a warmed dish. All of the sauce goes into the filling; the recipe's finish is cress and a ring of sautéd mushrooms.
- YieldA quart mould would serve roughly four as a main course, more as a first course.
Timbales take their name from the French timbale -- a kettledrum, and by extension the drum-shaped mould -- and American cookbooks of the 1880s through the 1910s used the word for almost any savoury custard set in a water bath and turned out whole. It is a made dish for leftover roast chicken or turkey, stretched with sauce and eggs and dressed up by the macaroni lining into something fit for company. Decorative moulded lining of this kind, whether with macaroni rings, sliced truffle or blanched vegetables, echoed professional French garde-manger work.