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Chicken Timbales
2 cups raw chicken meat teaspoon salt 1 cup bread crumbs - soft few grains cayenne 1 cup beaten cream 4 egg whites beaten until stiff Chop meat and press through sieve; add remaining ingredients and fill buttered timbale molds which have been previously sprinkled with finely chopped pickles or olives. Bake in pan of hot water twenty minutes. Remove and serve with Hollandaise Sauce or Parmesan Sauce.
A classic forcemeat custard, essentially a chicken mousseline set in a water bath. The method is sound; the wording assumes a 1907 kitchen and a cook who already knew what a timbale mold was.
- The hinge: keep everything coldRaw chicken puréed with cream will only hold together if the meat, the cream and the bowl stay chilled. If the mixture warms and the emulsion breaks, the timbales weep fat and water in the oven and turn grainy.
- MoldsTimbale molds were small straight-sided metal cups, commonly around 1/2 cup capacity. Buttered 4-ounce ramekins or dariole molds are a reasonable substitute; the recipe states no yield, but this quantity should fill roughly six to eight small molds depending on their size.
- "1 cup beaten cream"This means cream whipped and folded in rather than poured in liquid. Whether the cup was measured before or after whipping is not stated in the text, so either reading is defensible.
- Oven temperatureThe book leaves it unstated because a water bath is forgiving. Bake at 325 to 350F; the custard is done when it is just set at the center and reaches 165F on an instant-read thermometer, which may take 25 to 30 minutes in ceramic ramekins rather than the twenty specified for thin metal.
- Salt quantityThe line reads simply "teaspoon salt"; a numeral is missing from the text as it stands. A level teaspoon is not out of proportion for two cups of chicken and a cup of cream, though the original may have read a half. Taste a poached spoonful of the mixture before filling the molds if you want certainty.
- Chopping and sievingA food processor does in thirty seconds what the sieve was for. Pulse the raw chicken to a paste, then push it through a fine sieve anyway if you want the silky texture the original is after.
- Soft bread crumbsFresh crumbs torn from a day-old loaf, not dry packaged crumbs, which absorb far more liquid and will make the custard stodgy.
- The pickle or olive liningSprinkled into the buttered mold, it becomes a decorative garnish on top once the timbale is turned out. Chop it finely and blot it dry, or the brine will thin the custard where it touches.
- UnmoldingLet the timbales rest five minutes out of the water bath, run a knife around the rim, and invert onto warm plates. Sauce underneath rather than over so the pickled garnish stays visible.
Timbales take their name from the French timbale, a drum-shaped cup, and by the late nineteenth century the word covered both the mold and the small savory custard baked in it. They were a fixture of the entrée course in American and British service, and could be made in quantity ahead of a dinner. This one appears in Lowney's Cook Book, published by the Walter M. Lowney chocolate company in 1907, which despite its origins is a full general cookbook rather than a candy pamphlet -- Maria Willett Howard wrote it as a complete household manual, chocolate chapters and all. The pairing with Hollandaise or a Parmesan sauce is typical of the period's approach to a pale, delicately flavored dish.