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Timbale of Macaroni
Boil macaroni as usual in salted water; rinse in cold water and cut into pieces a third of an inch long. Line a mold with these, spreading the bottom and sides thickly with butter first and setting the open ends of the macaroni against the butter. Spread over the macaroni a forcemeat suitable to whatever is to constitute the filling of the timbale; then fill up the mold with highly seasoned fish, game, poultry or oysters. Moisten with sauce; cover with more forcemeat, pinching the edges well together so that the sauce will not break through in cooling. Set the mold in a pan of hot water; cover with buttered paper and bake in a moderate oven for half an hour.
A construction rather than a dish: the macaroni is only the shell, and everything that matters happens in the filling. Read the whole thing before you start, because the mold has to be lined and loaded in one go.
- The hinge: seal the forcemeatThe forcemeat is the gasket. The recipe's own concern is the cooling stage: if the top layer is not pinched firmly to the sides, the sauce breaks through as the timbale cools. Press the seam closed with wet fingers and check it before the paper goes on.
- ForcemeatA smooth, seasoned paste of ground meat or fish bound with egg and cream or a panade -- close to what a modern cook would call a mousseline or quenelle mixture. Match it to the filling: chicken forcemeat for poultry, whiting or salmon for fish. The recipe specifies no quantity; judge by eye what will line and cap the mold you are using.
- Moderate ovenGenerally taken as somewhere around 350F. The half hour suits a mold of modest depth; a deeper one will need longer.
- Cooked filling, raw shellThe recipe does not say whether the fish, game, poultry or oysters go in cooked or raw; "highly seasoned" and moistened with sauce suits already-cooked meat or fish. The forcemeat, however, goes in raw, so bake until the center is hot through -- 165F for a poultry forcemeat.
- The macaroniPeriod macaroni was a long, fairly thick hollow tube. Use bucatini or the largest hollow macaroni you can find, boiled until just tender -- slightly under is better, since it bakes again. The cold rinse stops the cooking and makes the pieces easier to handle.
- Lining the moldButter the mold heavily and chill it for ten minutes so the butter is firm; the cut lengths then stand upright and stick where you put them. Setting the open ends against the butter means the cut faces are on the outside, so the tubes read as neat rings when the timbale is turned out.
- Buttered paper and water bathButtered parchment, butter side down, or foil with a buttered parchment layer under it. The pan of hot water should come halfway up the mold and be topped up with boiling water if it drops.
- SauceUse a thick velouté or brown sauce -- thin sauce will seep through the seam. Moisten only; the filling should be coated, not swimming.
- Resting and servingLet it stand 10 minutes out of the water bath, run a knife around the rim, then unmold onto a warm platter. Serve extra sauce separately.
Timbale comes from the French for a kettledrum, by way of the drum-shaped metal mold the dish is baked in, and the word covers both the vessel and its contents. Dishes of this kind belonged to the ornamental side of nineteenth-century French cookery that American cookbooks and cooking schools took up enthusiastically: a modest quantity of cooked fish or game, bound with sauce and forcemeat, is dressed up into something that can be brought whole to the table and carved. That it sits under Vegetables here says more about how macaroni was classified in American books of the period -- filed with the starches and garden produce rather than treated as a dish in its own right -- than about what is actually in the mold. The technique is the same one behind the older raised pie and the lined charlotte: build an edible case, fill it, seal it, and cook it gently in a water bath so the case holds its shape.