Egg Timbales
Beat 6 eggs until light, add I level teaspoonful salt, 1 tablespoonful onion juice, 1/4 teaspoonful paprika and ¾ of a pint of milk. Butter some small timbale molds, dust with minced parsley or fine bread that has been browned in butter, fill with the egg mixture and stand in a pan of hot water. Cook in a moderate oven about thirty minutes or until the centers are firm. Turn out of the molds and pour about them any preferred sauce. Celery, bread, mushroom, cream or onion sauce are each excellent to serve with timbales.
A baked savoury custard, unmoulded and sauced. The whole thing turns on gentle heat: the water bath and a moderate oven keep the eggs from curdling into something weeping and grainy.
- Oven temperatureA moderate oven is 350F. If the custards puff and crack at the edges, the oven is too hot; drop to 325F and give them a few minutes longer.
- The water bathSet the filled moulds in a deep pan and pour in boiling water to come halfway up their sides. Water that reaches too high will slop over, and water that is too shallow does nothing at all.
- Milk quantityThe proportion intended is three-quarters of a pint of milk, that is 1 1/2 cups, to six eggs. That gives a custard soft enough to quiver but firm enough to turn out.
- Onion juiceGrate a peeled onion on the fine side of a box grater and press the pulp through a sieve. A tablespoon takes about half a medium onion. Bottled onion powder is not a good substitute here.
- Timbale mouldsSmall dariole moulds, ramekins or a muffin tin all work. Butter them generously and dust the butter with the parsley or browned crumbs, which both flavour the surface and help release the custard.
- DonenessThirty minutes is right for moulds of about 4 fl oz. Test with a knife tip a little off-centre: it should come out clean while the very middle still wobbles slightly. Carryover heat finishes them.
- UnmouldingLet them stand five minutes out of the water before turning out. Run a thin knife round the rim first. Straight from the oven they are too fragile to hold their shape.
- YieldSix eggs and 1 1/2 cups of milk fill about six small moulds, enough for four as a light main course or six as a first course.
Timbale is French for a kettledrum, and by extension the small drum-shaped mould that gives these custards their name; the same word covers everything from a savoury egg custard to a pastry case filled with creamed meat. Egg timbales appear commonly in American cookery books of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. The recipe closes with a list of finishing sauces: celery, bread, mushroom, cream or onion.