Home › Entrées › Imperial Fish Timbales
Imperial Fish Timbales
1 cup cooked fish 2 tablespoons butter 2 tablespoons flour ½ cup milk 3 egg yolks 1 teaspoon salt few grains cayenne 1 tablespoon lemon juice 1 teaspoon parsley 3 egg whites Melt butter; add flour, milk, seasonings and parsley; cook five minutes. Add fish, boil two minutes, egg yolks. Cool. Fold in stiffly beaten whites. Fill molds with this mixture. Set in a pan of hot water and bake twenty minutes.
Remove from mold and serve at once with Lobster, Shrimp, or Hollandaise Sauce.
A soufflé-style panada mixture baked in small molds in a water bath. The book assumes you know both the mold and the oven, so a few specifics are worth filling in.
- Oven temperatureNo temperature is given in the book. A moderate oven, about 350F, suits a 20-minute bake in molds of about 4 ounces; the water bath slows and evens the heat reaching the custard.
- Timbale moldsTimbale molds are small straight-sided metal cups, roughly half-cup capacity. Buttered ramekins or a muffin tin will stand in, though shallower cups set faster. Butter them generously or nothing will unmold cleanly.
- The hinge: yolks off the heatAdd the yolks after the fish has had its two minutes and the pan is off the burner, beating them in quickly. Dropped into a boiling sauce they scramble, and the timbales turn grainy rather than smooth.
- Water bath depthHot water should come halfway up the molds, not to the rim, and the pan should go into the oven with the water already hot, as the recipe specifies. Starting with cold water makes the timing unpredictable.
- The fishAny cooked white fish or salmon, flaked fine and picked over for bones and skin. Canned salmon or leftover poached halibut both work. A cup of flaked fish is about 5 ounces.
- Folding the whitesCool the base until it is barely warm before folding, or the whites deflate and the timbales bake dense. Fold in three additions and stop while a few streaks remain.
- Doneness and unmoldingThey are done when set at the center and just risen; a thin knife should come out clean. Let them stand two or three minutes before inverting so the edges pull away, then serve immediately, as they sink like any soufflé.
- YieldMakes about four to six small timbales, depending on mold size, which would have served as the entrée course at a formal dinner of the period.
Timbales were a fixture of turn-of-the-century American "entrée" cookery, the small hot course served after the fish and before the roast at a formal dinner. The name is generally traced to the French timbale, a kettledrum (and also a metal drinking cup), after the shape of the mold rather than anything about the filling, and the technique is simply a thick white sauce enriched with yolks and lightened with whites, so that scraps of cooked fish, chicken or sweetbread could be served as something that looked deliberate. Lowney's Cook Book (1907) was published by the Walter M. Lowney chocolate company and is now best remembered for its confectionery, though it was written as a general household cookbook rather than a candy pamphlet. The instruction to serve with lobster, shrimp or hollandaise sauce is characteristic: the timbale was understood as a neutral base whose interest came from the sauce poured over it.