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Green Pea Timbales
Press one pint cooked peas through a sieve; add four tablespoons milk or soup stock, few drops of onion juice, salt, pepper, cayenne, and the whites of three eggs, beaten until stiff. Press into buttered timbale molds, set in a pan of hot water, and bake in a slow oven until firm. Unmold, serve on hot platter. Garnish with a piece of parsley on the top of each timbale and Béchamel Sauce. Egg Plant baked in Shell Boil four egg plants twenty minutes. Cut in halves lengthwise. Scoop out center. Drain in cheese cloth. Mix one half cup bread crumbs, one quarter cup minced chicken, one quarter cup egg plant, two tablespoons butter, salt, paprika, and cayenne, and one egg. Fill egg plant shells with this mixture, cover with buttered and seasoned crumbs, and bake in a slow oven about one hour.
Two vegetable entrées from the same page: a moulded pea custard set in a water bath, and a stuffed eggplant. Both rely on an oven cooler than most modern recipes call for.
- Oven temperatureA "slow oven" in this period is 300-325F. That is right for the timbales, which are a custard and will curdle and weep if pushed hotter.
- Timbale moldsSmall straight-sided metal molds of about 4 oz. Buttered ramekins or a muffin tin work; the pint of peas will fill perhaps four to six of them, depending how much volume the beaten whites add.
- The hinge: fold, do not press"Press into molds" is misleading. Fold the stiff whites into the cooled pea purée in two or three additions, then spoon the mixture in and tap the molds to settle it. Compressing it drives out the air the whites were beaten for.
- DonenessBake in the water bath until the centers barely resist a light touch and a knife comes out clean, about 25-35 minutes for 4 oz molds. Let them stand five minutes before unmolding or they will slump.
- Onion juiceGrate a peeled onion on a fine grater and squeeze the pulp in a cloth. A quarter teaspoon is plenty for a pint of peas.
- Pea purée consistencyPea pur y pea of cooked peas sieved gives about a cup of pur y sweeter and moister than the peas the book assumed, so add the milk or stock gradually and stop when the pur y is thick enough to hold a spoon's shape.
- Eggplant: the minced chickenIt means cooked chicken, leftover from a roast or boiled fowl. Raw chicken in the stuffing will not reach a safe temperature reliably in a slow oven.
- Eggplant timingTwenty minutes of boiling leaves the shells fully cooked, so a full hour at 300F mainly dries them. Thirty to forty minutes is enough to set the egg-bound stuffing and brown the crumbs; a few minutes higher at the end helps the top.
- BéchamelThe sauce is assumed knowledge: equal butter and flour cooked without color, milk whisked in, simmered until it coats a spoon. Keep it thin enough to pool around the timbales rather than blanket them.
Timbales take their name from the French timbale, a metal drinking cup (the word is also used for a kettledrum), and they were the standard way a turn-of-the-century American cook dressed a vegetable up into an entr y: pur y bound with egg, cooked gently in a water bath, turned out and sauced. They belong to the same impulse as the moulded aspics and charlottes of the era, when the shape of a dish carried much of its claim to elegance and when a hostess with a set of little tin molds could produce something that looked like restaurant work. Lowney's, better known as a chocolate manufacturer, issued this book as promotional literature, which explains the mix of confectionery with a full run of household cookery like this.