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Egg Timbales
Beat six eggs without separating, add a scant teaspoonful of salt, a dash of pepper, a teaspoonful of chopped parsley, twenty drops of onion juice and one cup and a half of rich milk. Stir till well mixed. Butter small-sized timbale moulds and fill two-thirds full with the mixture. Place moulds in the blazer, pour boiling water about them threefourths to the tops of the moulds, and let cook about twenty minutes, or till the centres are firm; turn out of the moulds on to a warm platter, and pour about them a thin bread sauce.
A savory baked custard, cooked in a chafing dish over a water bath rather than in an oven. The hinge is heat control: the water around the moulds must stay just below a simmer, or the eggs curdle and weep.
- The blazerThe blazer is the shallow upper pan of a chafing dish, set over its own flame. Any wide skillet or sauté pan with a lid works, on a low burner, with the water kept at about 180F — steaming, never bubbling.
- Timbale mouldsSmall straight-sided metal cups of about 4 oz. Ramekins, custard cups, or a muffin tin lined with buttered rounds of parchment all substitute. Six eggs and 1 1/2 cups milk makes about two and three-quarter cups of mixture — enough to fill roughly eight such moulds two-thirds full.
- Rich milkPeriod "rich milk" means unhomogenized milk with cream still in it. Use half whole milk and half light cream, or all half-and-half; skim milk gives a watery, grainy set.
- Onion juiceTwenty drops is about 1/4 teaspoon. Grate a peeled onion on a fine rasp and press the pulp in a sieve, or grate half a small onion and squeeze it in a cloth.
- StrainingNot in the original, but pass the mixture through a fine sieve after mixing and skim the foam. Bubbles set into holes and make the turned-out timbale look coarse.
- Timing and donenessTwenty minutes is realistic only if the water goes in boiling and stays hot; allow 25-30 minutes over a low flame. They are done when a knife near the center comes out clean and the custard barely trembles — an internal temperature of about 175F. Past that the custard splits and leaks.
- UnmouldingLet the moulds stand out of the water for two or three minutes, run a thin knife around the edge, then invert. Straight from the heat they are too fragile to hold their shape.
- Thin bread sauceThe accompaniment is the English sauce of milk infused with onion and cloves, thickened with soft breadcrumbs and finished with butter. "Thin" means pourable, the consistency of cream, so it pools around the timbales rather than coating them.
- ServingThe batch serves three or four as a light lunch or supper dish, or six to eight as a first course. They must go out hot; reheated egg custard turns rubbery.
Timbale is the French word for a kettledrum, and also for a metal drinking cup; the name of the mould is usually traced to its drum-like shape. In American cooking of the 1890s and 1900s the savory egg timbale was a fixture of ladies' luncheons and invalid cookery alike — mild, soft, and elegant on a plate for very little money. Its appearance in a chafing-dish chapter belongs to a specific fashion: the chafing dish was the era's fashionable apparatus for cooking at the table, in college rooms, at after-theater suppers, and in households without a servant to stand over a range. Fannie Farmer and her contemporaries filled whole books with what could be produced over a single spirit lamp, and a water bath set inside the blazer was the standard trick for anything that needed gentle, indirect heat. Bread sauce is the traditional English partner to roast game birds; thin and pale, it suits the timbales here.