Home › Entrées › Lobster Timbales
Lobster Timbales
Follow recipe for Fish Timbales, substituting one cup of lobster meat for fish and adding one half cup mushrooms finely chopped. Cook same as Fish Timbales. Serve with Béchamel Sauce, garnish each timbale with a sprig of parsley, and sprinkle coral pressed through a sieve over all.
A variation recipe that assumes you have the Fish Timbales formula in front of you: a fine forcemeat bound with thick white sauce and egg, packed into small molds and baked in a water bath. The points below cover what the shorthand leaves out.
- The hinge: gentle, moist heatTimbales are a custard-bound mousseline and will curdle or weep if baked dry or hot. The book gives no temperature; in a modern oven, set the buttered molds in a pan of hot water reaching halfway up their sides and bake at about 325-350F until just set in the center, roughly 20-30 minutes for 4-oz molds.
- What a timbale mold isA small straight-sided metal cup, about half a cup in capacity — a dariole mold, or a ramekin, or a muffin tin at a pinch. The name comes from the drum shape, not from any particular pastry.
- CoralThe dark green roe of a female lobster, which turns coral red on cooking. It must be cooked through before it is pushed through a sieve; raw roe is unpleasant in both flavor and texture. If your lobster has none, the dish loses only its garnish.
- Lobster meatOne cup of picked meat is roughly the yield of one 1 1/4 lb lobster. Chop it rather than mincing to paste, or the finished timbale reads as pink pudding. Claw and knuckle meat has better texture here than tail.
- The mushroomsHalf a cup of chopped raw mushrooms will release water into the custard. Sweat them in butter until dry first, then cool before folding in.
- Béchamel in 1907Bechamel in 1907 -- American cookbooks of this period often gave bechamel as a white sauce built on veal or chicken stock as well as milk, finished with cream — richer than the plain milk bechamel of modern usage; the book's own bechamel recipe is the one that applies. Lobster shells simmered in the milk make a sound substitute for that depth.
- UnmoldingLet the baked timbales stand five minutes out of the water bath before turning out, so the custard firms. Run a thin knife around the edge and invert onto a warm plate; sauce goes around the base, not over the top.
- YieldOne cup of lobster with the mushrooms and binding gives four to six small timbales — a first course for four, or a light lunch dish for two or three.
Lowney's Cook Book (1907) was compiled by Maria Willett Howard for the Walter M. Lowney Company, a Boston chocolate manufacturer, which explains both the generous chocolate chapters and the confidently French entrée section: a promotional cookbook needed to look like the kind of book an ambitious American housekeeper would keep. The timbale — from the French for a drum-shaped cup — was one of the standard entrée forms of the era, a way of turning expensive scraps of shellfish or game into an elegant molded portion, and it depended on the same panada-and-egg technique that produced quenelles and mousselines in professional kitchens. Lobster appears here as an ordinary variation on a fish recipe. The coral garnish is sieved over the top for color.