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Chicken Timbales
Veal Forcemeat 2 cups raw lean veal 1 cup stale bread crumbs 2 cups cream 1/8 teaspoon mace 6 tablespoons shortening 2 teaspoons salt 1/8 teaspoon white pepper 4 egg whites Scrape veal to pulp and pound smooth; cook bread crumbs in cream with mace for 20 minutes, combine ingredients, beat all together, mashing to a smooth paste. Fold in egg whites beaten stiff.
This is a component rather than a finished dish: a classic veal forcemeat, the smooth bound paste used to line or fill timbale moulds and quenelles. Everything depends on keeping the mixture cold and getting it genuinely smooth before the whites go in.
- The hinge: temperatureA forcemeat bound with cream and egg white will break if it warms up. Chill the veal, the cream mixture and the bowl, and work quickly; if the paste looks grainy or weeps liquid, it has gone too warm.
- "Scrape veal to pulp and pound smooth"This is the pre-processor method — scraping the meat off the fibres with a spoon edge, then working it in a mortar. A food processor does the same job in a minute or two; pulse in short bursts with the meat very cold, then push it through a sieve for the texture the original expects.
- The panadeBread crumbs cooked in cream is a panade, and 20 minutes over low heat should reduce it to a thick paste. Use low heat and stir often, as 2 cups of cream will scorch. Cool it before combining.
- ShorteningIn a book of this vintage "shortening" means butter, lard or a hydrogenated vegetable fat interchangeably. For a delicate white forcemeat use butter, softened but not melted, 6 tablespoons being three-quarters of a stick.
- MaceMace is the outer covering of the nutmeg seed, milder and less sweet than nutmeg itself. An eighth of a teaspoon is deliberate restraint; ground mace loses its aroma fast, so check that yours still smells of anything.
- Folding the whitesFold the stiff whites in with a spatula in three additions, and stop as soon as no streaks show. Overworking here is what makes a timbale rubbery rather than light.
- Cooking itVeal forcemeat is never eaten raw. The recipe as printed stops at the mixing; packed into buttered moulds and set in a water bath, a small timbale will take roughly 25 to 35 minutes at around 350F, and is done when the centre is firm and reads 160F. Test one before serving the rest.
- YieldTwo cups of raw veal plus the panade makes a generous quantity, enough for a number of individual timbales or to line a single large mould with filling to spare.
Forcemeat -- the word goes back to the French farce, a stuffing, with the English form apparently reshaped towards the idea of forcing meat into a mould -- was a mainstay of genteel cookery from the eighteenth century well into the twentieth. Veal was a favoured meat because it is pale, mild and gelatinous, so it binds without asserting a flavour of its own, which is why it appears as the neutral base under chicken, sweetbreads or game. The timbale itself takes its name from the drum-shaped mould (usually traced to Arabic tabl, a drum, by way of Spanish and French) and represents exactly the sort of dish a household cook was expected to produce for company: labour-intensive, visually tidy, and requiring the mortar-and-sieve patience that a book like this one still assumed of its readers. Recipes of this kind faded from home cookery, though how much of that was changing taste and how much the disappearance of household help is not something this recipe can settle.