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Pepper, Salt and Spice
Two Eggs and one Yolk of Egg.
A few Truffles.
A little Ham and Tongue.
Half a pint of Supreme Sauce.
Quarter of a pound of Puff Paste.
Remove the meat from the pigeons; pound it in a mortar with the suet and the bacon cut into strips; rub it through a wire sieve; return it to the mortar; add the butter, three chopped mushrooms, the panada, and a tablespoonful of Allemande or velouté sauce; season well with pepper, salt, and aromatic spice; work it thoroughly, and add two whole eggs gradually and one yolk of an egg. Butter twelve small timbale moulds; line them rather thickly with the above farce; place a dessertspoonful of salpicon of pigeon, ham, tongue, truffles, and mushrooms in the centre of each; fill them up and cover them with the forcemeat. Place them in a sauté-pan, pour in some boiling water to steam them, cover with a buttered paper, bring it to the boil over the fire, and steam in a hot oven for about twenty minutes. When done, turn them out; dish them in a circle; place a small mushroom head and a piece of a truffle on each; pour some supreme sauce over and round them; garnish with a few fleurons of puff paste and fancy shapes of sliced ox-tongue.
This is a pigeon timbale from the late-Victorian professional repertoire, and the page as printed begins mid-way through its ingredient list — the pigeons, suet, bacon, butter, mushrooms and panada are named only in the method. Read the method first and work backwards to build your shopping list.
- Missing quantitiesThe surviving text gives no weights for the pigeons, suet, bacon, butter or panada. For twelve moulds, reckon on the meat of three or four squab (about 1 lb boneless), 2 oz suet, 2 oz bacon, 2 oz butter and about 4 oz panada; treat these as reconstruction rather than the author's figures.
- PanadaA thick binding paste of bread or flour cooked in milk or stock until it leaves the side of the pan, then cooled. It is what keeps the farce tender rather than rubbery, and it must be cold before it goes into the mortar.
- The mother saucesAllemande is velouté enriched with egg yolk and cream; suprême is chicken velouté finished with cream. Both start from a blond roux and a light stock, and neither is sold ready-made. Half a pint, imperial measure, is 10 fl oz — about 1 1/4 US cups.
- PigeonIn a recipe of this kind the bird intended is usually a young, tender one — squab, now generally sold frozen at good butchers — though Victorian kitchens used wild wood pigeon as well. Wild pigeon is darker and stronger and will dominate the farce. Boneless chicken thigh with a little duck breast is a reasonable stand-in.
- Sieving and the food processorThe mortar-and-sieve routine exists to get an absolutely smooth, homogenous farce. A food processor does the same work in a minute, but keep everything refrigerator-cold and add the eggs one at a time or the emulsion will break and weep fat during cooking.
- SalpiconA salpicon is simply a dice of cooked pigeon, ham, tongue, truffle and mushroom; the recipe does not specify a size or say it is bound, though a little of the thick sauce is the usual treatment. Cut it small: coarse pieces tear the thin lining of farce when you fill the moulds.
- Moulds and the water bathSmall timbale moulds are dariole moulds of about 3 fl oz; buttered ramekins work. The boiling water in the sauté-pan is best brought about halfway up the moulds, and 'a hot oven' in a book of this date is somewhere around 400–450F — the water bath keeps the farce itself well below that.
- DonenessTwenty minutes is right for 3 oz moulds, but check with a probe: the centre should read 165F, and the timbale should feel set and spring back. Undercooked poultry farce collapses when turned out.
- YieldTwelve small timbales serve six as a first course, or four as a main dish with the suprême sauce and fleurons.
The timbale takes its name from the drum-shaped mould it is cooked in — timbale is French for a kettledrum, a word generally traced back through Spanish atabal to the Arabic al-tabl, 'the drum'. Dishes of this type were a familiar set piece of professional hotel and large-household cookery in the later nineteenth century, a way of turning a small quantity of expensive meat into something that could be dished in a neat circle with sauce poured round. Pigeon suited the form well: pigeons had long been kept in dovecotes on English estates and farms, and a young bird was tender enough to pound smooth while its flavour was strong enough to survive being bound with suet, panada and egg. The apparatus of this recipe — the mortar, the wire sieve, the salpicon, the fleurons of puff paste, the fancy shapes of ox tongue cut for garnish — belongs to the kitchen brigade rather than the family cook.