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Salt and Pepper (Two ounces of Beef Marrow)
Two ounces of Beef Marrow.
Pound the chicken, panada, eggs and seasoning all together, pass through a hair-sieve, stir in the sauce and cream very carefully; grease your tins, and fill with the mixture, put in the centre a slice of marrow; cover over and steam for ten minutes, serve with good sauce round.
Timbales de Volaille (No. 1).
Ingredients.
Half a pound of Quenelle Meat.
Six ounces of the breast of a cooked Chicken.
Two ounces of lean cooked Ham.
This page has come through the printing process scrambled: what you see is the method for a chicken timbale followed by the ingredient list for the recipe that succeeds it. Read it as one dish — a steamed chicken forcemeat in small moulds with marrow at the centre — and fill in the quantities from the list that follows.
- What the mixture actually isPounded cooked chicken breast and ham bound with quenelle meat (raw chicken or veal forcemeat), panada, egg and cream. The panada is a thick binding paste of flour or breadcrumbs cooked in milk or stock and cooled — bread panada is quickest: 4 oz crumbs simmered in 1/2 cup milk until it leaves the pan clean.
- The hinge: keep everything coldThe cream and the sauce go in "very carefully" because a forcemeat of this kind will split if it warms. Chill the pounded base, then beat the cream in a little at a time over ice. A split mixture steams into a grainy, weeping timbale.
- Hair-sieveA fine-mesh sieve of horsehair, used to force the pounded meat through and remove sinew. A drum sieve (tamis) and a plastic scraper does the same work; a food processor followed by a pass through a fine sieve is faster and gives a better texture than the processor alone.
- TinsDariole moulds or small ramekins of about 4 fl oz. Butter them well and line the base with a disc of buttered paper. "Cover over" may mean a buttered paper or foil lid so condensation does not fall into the mixture, though following straight on from the slice of marrow it could equally mean covering the marrow with the rest of the forcemeat.
- Beef marrowTwo ounces is a small amount: a single large canoe-cut bone will usually give that and more. Ask a butcher for canoe-cut bones. Soak in cold salted water, push out the marrow, and cut neat slices; it should go in cold so it melts as the timbale sets rather than before.
- Steaming timeTen minutes suits shallow moulds in a properly steaming steamer. Depth matters more than the clock: the timbales are done when the centre is firm to a light press and reads 165F. Undercooked forcemeat collapses when turned out.
- "Good sauce"For a dish of this kind that means a suprême or velouté made from chicken stock, finished with cream — poured around the turned-out timbales rather than over them, as the instruction 'sauce round' indicates.
- YieldHalf a pound of quenelle meat plus the chicken and ham makes roughly six to eight small timbales.
The timbale takes its name from the drum-shaped mould (French timbale, by way of Spanish atabal from the Arabic al-ṭabl, a drum), and by the late nineteenth century it was one of the standard shapes in which a British professional kitchen sent up chicken. The method here begins in mid-air, with no instructions for making either the quenelle meat or the panada, both being preparations a professional larder would have had ready. The slice of marrow hidden in the middle is characteristic of the period's taste for marrow in made dishes, on savoury toasts and in marrow puddings.