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Rice Timbales
Pack boiled rice into small buttered molds; let stand in hot water for fifteen minutes and serve as a garnish or as an entrée with some sweet sauce. 3/4 cup flour 1/2 teaspoon salt
A one-sentence recipe of the kind loose-leaf books printed by the dozen, with a stray line of type from a neighboring recipe attached to the end. It assumes you already have cooked rice and know what a timbale mold is.
- Ignore the flour and saltThe "3/4 cup flour, 1/2 teaspoon salt" appears to be stray type; nothing in the method uses either. Do not add flour to the rice.
- Timbale moldsSmall straight-sided cups holding about 1/3 to 1/2 cup: ramekins, custard cups, or a muffin tin all work. Butter them heavily and, for insurance, line the base with a round of parchment.
- The rice is the whole recipeStarchy, sticky rice holds the shape best. Short- or medium-grain rice boiled soft and still warm packs into a mold; long-grain or day-old rice is far more likely to collapse when turned out. Some period timbale recipes bind the rice with a beaten egg or two per two cups of rice, which is worth doing if the timbales are to be handled.
- "Let stand in hot water"Set the filled molds in a pan with hot water reaching halfway up their sides. The recipe says only that they stand in hot water, so a bare simmer or simply very hot water will do; fifteen minutes is enough to heat and firm the packed rice through, and longer only dries the tops.
- UnmoldingLet the molds sit a minute off the heat, run a thin knife around the edge, then invert onto the plate with a firm downward tap. Serve at once; they slump as they cool.
- Sweet sauceThe period default would be a thin custard, a hard sauce, or a fruit syrup. If you are using the timbales as a garnish for meat or vegetables instead, skip the sauce entirely.
- YieldAbout two cups of cooked rice fills four to six small molds — one per person as a garnish, two as a dessert course.
The timbale takes its name from the French timbale, a drum, by way of the drum-shaped mold; by the late nineteenth century American cookbooks used the word for almost anything packed into a small mold and set in a water bath, from chicken forcemeat to spinach purée to plain rice. Its appeal was visual: identical molded portions read as refinement on a table, and they turned leftovers into a course. That this one is finished with sweet sauce shows how loosely the categories of the period held — rice was useful as a starch wherever it was wanted. Mrs. Fryer's loose-leaf format, with pages meant to be removed and re-sorted by the cook, leaves the orphaned line of flour and salt unexplained.