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Rice Timbale Cases
salt, pepper and cayenne lemon juice, onion juice 4 cups milk Wash rice; add seasonings and milk. Cook in double boiler until milk is absorbed and rice is tender.
Fill timbale molds, press rice in firmly, cool, scoop out center, and fill with any creamed mixture.
A rice case is a mould of seasoned rice cooked until stiff, then hollowed to hold a creamed filling. It works, but only if the rice is cooked dry enough to hold its shape.
- ProportionsThe quantity of rice is missing from the text as printed; only the 4 cups of milk survive. A cup of raw white rice to that quart of milk is a reasonable working assumption for a soft, fully absorbed grain, but it is a guess, not the book's figure.
- The hinge is drynessCook until the milk is entirely absorbed and the rice looks sticky rather than soupy. Rice with liquid left in it will slump the moment you turn it out, and no amount of pressing will fix it.
- Double boilerThe double boiler is not fussiness. Milk and rice scorch readily over direct heat, and the milk sugars will catch on the pan bottom before the grain is tender. No time is given; expect the better part of an hour.
- Timbale moldsThese were small straight-sided metal cups, generally of a few ounces' capacity. Ramekins, dariole moulds, or even a muffin tin serve. Butter them well; unbuttered rice cases stick.
- Cooling mattersChill the filled moulds thoroughly, an hour or more, before unmoulding and scooping. Warm rice tears; cold set rice cuts cleanly with a teaspoon.
- Onion juiceGrate an onion and press the pulp through a fine sieve, or grate on a microplane and use the wet scrapings. A teaspoon is ample for this quantity.
- ServingOn the assumed cup of rice, expect six to eight cases. Fill with creamed chicken, sweetbreads, mushrooms or fish; if the filling has cooled, the assembled cases can be warmed briefly in a moderate oven, though the recipe says nothing of this.
Timbale cases belong to the era when an entree was expected to arrive in an edible container. Lowney's, published by a Boston chocolate company and aimed at the competent middle-class cook, offers rice here as the cheap and reliable alternative to a pastry timbale or a bread croustade: the same silhouette on the plate for the price of a cup of rice and a quart of milk. The word timbale in French covers both a kettledrum and a metal drinking cup, and the culinary sense is usually traced to the drum- or cup-shaped mould, though the exact line of borrowing is not settled. Creamed mixtures served in a hollowed shell were a familiar way of stretching a small amount of chicken, sweetbread or leftover fish into a course, and they persisted in American cooking well into the mid-twentieth century.