Home › Entrees › Chicken Timbales
Chicken Timbales
1 cup of rich sweet milk or cream. Breast of 1 chicken. 1/2 cup bread crumbs. Whites of 3 eggs.
Run breast through grinder until very fine. Put crumbs in milk over steam and cook until thick. Mix in chicken. Add beaten whites of three eggs. Put in timbale molds. Set in hot water and cook fifteen minutes.
A French-style forcemeat baked in small molds. The whole thing hinges on the panade: the crumbs and milk must be cooked to a stiff paste before the chicken goes in, or the mixture will weep liquid in the molds and the timbales will collapse when turned out.
- Timbale moldsSmall straight-sided drum molds, roughly 4 to 6 oz each. Buttered ramekins, custard cups or a muffin tin do the same job. This quantity fills four small molds.
- "Cook until thick"Combine the cup of milk or cream with the half cup of crumbs and cook over simmering water, stirring, until it thickens to a heavy paste that holds its shape on the spoon, a matter of several minutes. Cool it to lukewarm before adding the chicken and whites, or the egg will set prematurely.
- The grinderA food processor replaces it. Work the raw breast to a smooth paste with the bowl and blade cold; if the meat is allowed to warm the mixture can break and turn grainy.
- Timing and donenessFifteen minutes suits very small molds. Judge by an internal temperature of 165F and a center that is set and springs back, not by the clock; deeper molds may need 25 to 30 minutes.
- SeasoningThe original gives none. Salt is essential here, and white pepper with a scrape of nutmeg is the classic treatment for a chicken forcemeat.
- The whitesBeat to soft peaks, not stiff, and fold in. Overbeaten whites give a dry, spongy timbale rather than a tender one; the whites are there for lightness, the panade for structure.
- ServingRest the molds a minute or two, run a knife around the edge and invert onto a warm plate. Timbales of this kind are usually served with a sauce: a thin bechamel, a mushroom or supreme sauce, or peas around the base.
The timbale takes its name from the French timbale, a drum, after the shape of the mold rather than anything about the filling, and it descends from the older kitchen repertoire of quenelles and forcemeats in which pounded raw meat is bound with a bread-and-milk panade and lightened with egg. By the time Mrs. Mary A. Wilson was writing for American households around 1920, that technique had found a place in the home kitchen: it turned a single chicken breast into a company entree for four, which is very much the logic of her book, written in the wake of wartime food conservation campaigns and aimed at cooks who needed refinement and thrift in the same dish. Timbales, croquettes and cutlets appear in American cookbooks of this period for exactly that reason, and they fell out of fashion as the century went on.