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Rice Timbales
1 pint of milk 3 ounces of ground rice 2 ounces of butter 3 mashed potatoes 4 drops of onion juice Pepper and salt Scald the milk in a double boiler and add the rice which has been mixed with a little of the cold milk; cook for fifteen minutes, then add the mashed potato, butter, onion juice and seasoning. Cook until the mixture is thick; pour into buttered egg cups, press down, leave for five minutes and turn out. Mark the top with a cutter and fry in deep oil or vegetable fat a golden brown. Remove the round from the top, scoop out a little of the rice and fill the depression with a curry mixture or currant jelly.
A rice croquette dressed up as a timbale, and the whole thing hangs on the mixture setting firm enough to hold its shape in hot fat. Five minutes in the cups is optimistic; give it much longer.
- Ground riceThis is rice ground fine, sold now as rice flour or cream of rice, not whole grains. Three ounces is roughly two-thirds of a cup. Whole rice will not thicken the milk the same way and the timbales will not hold.
- Pint of milkIf the book is American, read this as 2 cups; in a British text a pint is 20 fl oz and the mixture will be slacker. Either way, judge by thickness rather than volume.
- Three mashed potatoesGenuinely ambiguous. Three medium potatoes will mash out to something like two cups; if you want a stiff mixture, start with about a cup of firm, dry mash (roughly 8 ounces of cooked potato) with no milk or cream worked into it and add more only if the mixture stays workable. Wet mash is the main cause of timbales that collapse in the oil.
- ButterTwo ounces is 4 tablespoons, half a stick.
- Setting the mouldsChill the filled egg cups in the refrigerator until cold and firm, at least an hour, rather than resting them five minutes on the counter. A warm mixture will slump the moment it hits the fat.
- Frying temperatureDeep fat at 375F gives a golden crust in two to three minutes without the interior softening. Below 350F the timbales absorb oil and slouch; above 400F the outside colours before the shape has set.
- Marking the topPress a small round cutter partway into the top before frying so you can lift out a lid afterwards, as you would with a vol-au-vent. Scoop shallowly; the walls are thin.
- Onion juiceFour drops is a whisper of flavour. Grate a little onion and press the pulp through a fine sieve, or substitute a pinch of onion powder.
- Yield and servingPerhaps six to eight standard egg cups, depending on their size, so three or four servings as a light main course with a vegetable. Fill hot with a curry sauce, or with currant jelly, which the period would have accepted either alongside a savoury or as a sweeter finish.
A timbale takes its name from the French for a kettledrum or a small metal drinking cup, and by the nineteenth century it was used of mixtures set in a small straight-sided mould and turned out whole. Cookery writers of the period liked the form because it gave humble material a shape and a silhouette: here ground rice and potato, bound with milk and butter, is made to stand up on the plate like a pastry case. The dish belongs to a moment when vegetarian cookery in English is often said to have leaned on constructions that could occupy the position on the plate a cutlet or a croquette would otherwise hold. The optional finish tells you the same story twice over: the same fried shell serves as a savoury with curry sauce or as a pudding with currant jelly, depending on where in the meal it is needed.