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Macaroni Timbales
Boil twelve sticks of macaroni in salted water until tender, cut in rings. Line thickly buttered timbale molds with macaroni rings. Fill center with creamed macaroni, creamed fish, or Welsh Rarebit mixture. Cover with macaroni rings. Set molds in a pan of hot water and bake twenty minutes. Remove from molds and serve with Béchamel, Allemande, or Hollandaise Sauce as an entrée; or line a large mold and fill with creamed mushrooms, creamed sweetbreads, creamed chicken, veal or turkey, adding several beaten eggs to give the mixture right consistency.
Prepared in this way it may be served for luncheon.
A straightforward bain-marie entrée that depends almost entirely on how the molds are lined. Everything else is a matter of what you have to fill it with.
- Twelve sticks of macaroniMacaroni was sold in long straight tubes, roughly the length of spaghetti, not the elbows in a box today. The recipe gives no yield; twelve sticks will likely fill only a few small molds. Look for long-cut ziti or bucatini, which slice into rings the same way.
- Cut in ringsBoil the tubes until just tender, cool them enough to handle, then slice crosswise into rounds about a quarter-inch thick. Cold macaroni cuts cleanly; hot macaroni tears.
- Lining the moldThis is the hinge. Butter the molds heavily and press the rings on cut side out, overlapping slightly so no gaps show, or the filling will bleed through and the timbale will collapse when turned out. Chill the lined molds for fifteen minutes before filling.
- Timbale moldsSmall individual molds, typically straight-sided and a few ounces in capacity. Ovenproof ramekins or a muffin tin work, though the tall shape unmolds more dramatically.
- Oven heatNo temperature is given, as was common in books of this period. A moderate oven, around 350F, suits it; the water bath also limits how hot the contents can get.
- Water bathThe hot water should come halfway up the molds and should never be allowed to boil, which would jostle the molds and toughen the egg in the large-mold version.
- The eggsEggs are called for only in the large luncheon mold, where the filling has to set firmly enough to slice. The recipe says only 'several,' enough to give the mixture the right consistency.
- Welsh Rarebit fillingA melted-cheese sauce, made variously with ale, beer or milk. Use it on the stiff side here; a loose rarebit will run out of the macaroni casing.
- Yield and unmoldingThe recipe gives no count; expect a small number of individual timbales. Let them stand a few minutes out of the oven before running a knife around the edge and inverting, or they break apart.
Timbale in French names both a metal drinking cup and a kettledrum, and the culinary term is generally traced to the cup-like shape of the mold; the kettledrum connection is often repeated but is not settled. By the late nineteenth century timbales were a fixture of the American entree course: a small, neat, individually plated thing that could be made from leftovers and still look composed. Lining a mold with macaroni rings, rice, noodles or forcemeat and filling the middle with something creamed was a familiar maneuver of the period's cooking schools, which taught economy dressed as elegance. Lowney's Cook Book was published by the Walter M. Lowney Company, a Boston chocolate manufacturer, and like other company cookbooks of its era it surrounded its promotional confectionery chapters with a full course of conventional household recipes so the book would earn a place on the kitchen shelf. The list of possible fillings here, running from fish to sweetbreads to turkey, tells you exactly what the recipe was for: whatever was in the icebox on Monday.