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Chicken Timbales
Pass the breast of a raw chicken through a meatchopper five or six times; beat in, one at a time, the whites of two small eggs (the whites of the eggs are not to be previously beaten), then beat in very gradually one cup of thick cream. Season with half a teaspoonful of salt and one-fourth a teaspoonful of white pepper. Turn the mixture into buttered moulds, set them in the blazer, and cook, surrounded with hot water to two-thirds their height and covered, about twenty minutes.
The water should not boil; if, with the flame turned low, it still boils, set the blazer into the bath, in which the water may boil vigorously without harm to the timbales. Serve with
A classic chicken mousseline, made in the chafing dish rather than the oven. The whole recipe hinges on keeping everything cold and the water below a simmer.
- The hinge: never let the water boilA boiling bath makes the egg white set hard and squeeze out the cream, so the timbales curdle and weep. Hold the water at 170-180F, barely trembling, and keep the pan covered.
- Blazer and bathThe blazer is the shallow upper pan of a chafing dish, used directly over the flame; the bath (or hot-water pan) is the outer pan that sits between flame and blazer. Without a chafing dish, use a wide saute pan of water on the lowest burner setting, or a 325F oven with the moulds in a roasting pan of hot water.
- Keep it coldA raw mousseline breaks if it warms while you work. Chill the chicken, egg whites and cream, and if you use a food processor instead of the five or six passes through a meat chopper, pulse rather than run it, adding the cream in a thin stream at the end.
- QuantitiesOne breast, two small egg whites and a cup of heavy cream gives roughly two cups of mixture: four small timbale moulds or ramekins of about 1/2 cup each, enough for four as a first course. "Thick cream" in a book of this date simply means the richest cream available, unstandardised; use heavy cream, around 36 percent fat, as lighter cream makes a softer, wetter set.
- DonenessTwenty minutes suits small moulds; larger ones will need noticeably longer, perhaps half again as much. Cook until the centre is just firm to the touch and reads 165F on an instant-read thermometer, the safe finish temperature for poultry; the custard itself will have set somewhat before that.
- UnmouldingButter the moulds generously and let them stand two or three minutes off the heat before turning out, then blot the plate if any liquid has wept free.
- The missing sauceThe text breaks off mid-sentence at "Serve with." A white sauce is the likely completion: a bechamel, or a veloute made with chicken stock, and books of this period often add mushrooms, peas or a little sherry.
- White pepperNot merely a seasoning choice: black pepper would fleck the pale mixture. A quarter teaspoon in this volume is assertive, so taste a poached spoonful before filling the moulds.
Timbale takes its name from the French word for a drum or drum-shaped cup, and by the late nineteenth century it meant both the small straight-sided mould and anything cooked in one. The forcemeat itself is a mousseline, the classic French ratio of lean raw flesh, egg white and cream, and it was a standard test of a cook's hand because it depends entirely on temperature and patience rather than on any listed ingredient. What is distinctive here is the vessel: American cookbooks around 1900 were full of chafing-dish cookery, promoted for chambers, clubrooms and late suppers where there was no stove, and this recipe belongs squarely to that vogue. Adapting a dish to a spirit lamp on a sideboard was exactly the sort of translation these books existed to make, and the fussing over whether the water boils is the price of using an open flame you cannot precisely regulate.