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Cheese Timbales
Butter some timbale molds; roll out some pastry and line the molds. Put into a saucepan 1 tablespoonful of butter with 1 tablespoonful of flour, mix till smooth over the fire; add ½ cupful of milk; stir till they boil; cook five minutes; then add I heaping tablespoonful of grated cheese, 2 well-beaten eggs, seasoning of salt, pepper and cayenne; fill the molds with this and bake for twenty minutes. Turn out carefully and serve hot.
A small cheese soufflé-custard baked in a pastry case. The original gives no oven temperature and no yield, so both need filling in.
- Oven temperatureNo heat is specified. Twenty minutes for a custard in pastry points to a moderate oven, 350-375F. Higher and the egg mixture puffs, cracks and then collapses on turning out.
- Timbale moldsStraight-sided metal or ceramic dariole molds of about 4 fl oz. Small ramekins, popover cups or a muffin tin of similar depth all work; the shape matters more than the name.
- YieldThe quantities given — half a cup of milk, two eggs, one heaping tablespoonful of cheese — make about a cupful of filling, enough for three or four small molds depending on their size. The original states no yield.
- The hinge: pastry and custard cook at different ratesA raw lining under a wet filling goes soggy. Line the molds, chill them, and set the pastry with a few minutes of blind baking before the cheese mixture goes in.
- Cooking the roux"Mix till smooth over the fire" then "cook five minutes" after the milk goes in means a thick, well-cooked white sauce. Cook out the raw flour taste before adding milk, and let the sauce cool slightly before beating in the eggs so they do not scramble.
- The cheeseOne heaping tablespoon of grated cheese for half a cup of milk is a modest amount by current taste. A dry, sharp cheese — aged Cheddar, Gruyère, Parmesan — gives more flavour per spoonful than a mild one, and two to three tablespoons will not upset the set.
- Filling the moldsFill to about three-quarters. The eggs will rise while baking and a brim-full mold overflows and welds itself to the tin.
- Turning outLet them stand two or three minutes off the heat so the custard firms, then run a knife around the pastry edge and invert. Straight from the oven they are too fragile to unmold cleanly.
Timbale comes from the French for a drum or kettledrum, borrowed for the small deep mold and then for anything baked in it — the name describes the vessel, not the filling. Nineteenth-century French cookery used timbale cases of pastry or forcemeat for everything from sweetbreads to macaroni, and by the time this book was written the form had passed into English and American household cooking as a tidy way to serve a small quantity of something rich in individual portions.