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Chafing-dish Dainties (It half a teaspoonful of salt)
in it, half a teaspoonful of salt and a few grains of cayenne. Cook in the double boiler for about an hour; stir occasionally. Remove the onion, beat well, and add one tablespoonful of butter. Put one tablespoonful of butter over the fire in a small saucepan; when hot add two-thirds a cup of rather coarse bread crumbs; stir over a hot fire till they are brown and crisp. Sprinkle over the timbales and sauce. Add a sprig of parsley to the top of each timbale.
This page picks up mid-sentence: what survives is the tail of a timbale recipe — the finishing of a sauce in the double boiler and a topping of buttered crumbs. The proportions below are only those given here, so treat it as a method note rather than a complete formula.
- What a timbale isA timbale is a savory custard — usually puréed vegetable, fish or poultry bound with egg and cream — baked or steamed in small straight-sided molds and turned out. The name is from the French timbale, a drum-shaped cup, and refers to the mold, not the filling.
- The double boiler is the chafing dishIn a chafing-dish book, "double boiler" may well mean the water pan set under the blazer over the lamp, though the term was also used for the ordinary stovetop pair. Any heatproof bowl over barely simmering water does the same job; the point is that the sauce never touches direct heat, so it is far less likely to curdle or scorch.
- An hour is for a starch-thickened sauceA full hour over water points to a flour- or cornstarch-bound sauce, which tolerates and benefits from long gentle cooking to lose its raw taste. If the sauce contains egg yolks, stop as soon as it coats the spoon and thickens — much beyond 180F and it will scramble.
- The onionThe instruction to "remove the onion" shows it was steeped in the sauce for flavor and then lifted out, not left in the finished dish. No size is given on the surviving page.
- "A few grains of cayenne"Roughly a pinch — less than an eighth of a teaspoon. Cayenne strength varies, so start at the low end.
- Buttered crumbsTwo-thirds of a cup of coarse crumbs to a tablespoon of butter browns fast. Use torn day-old bread rather than fine dry crumbs, keep the pan moving, and pull them off the heat while they are golden; they darken in the residual butter.
- Assemble at the last minuteCrumbs sprinkled over sauce go soft within a few minutes. Sauce the timbales, scatter the crumbs, add the parsley and serve at once.
The chafing dish had a genuine vogue in American middle-class homes around 1900, when a spirit lamp and a pair of nested pans promised hot food at the table without a servant or a coal range — the era of late suppers, card parties and bachelor apartments. Timbales belong to the same moment: a French restaurant form, adapted by the cooking-school writers into something a home cook could produce in a set of tin molds and dress up with a sauce and a spoonful of browned crumbs. Buttered crumbs are one of the signature touches of the Boston Cooking School tradition, used on scalloped dishes, gratins and creamed anything, and they do real work here, supplying the crunch that an all-soft plate of custard and sauce otherwise lacks.