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Ham Timbales
INGREDIENTS. 1½ cups of milk or thin cream.
1 cup of cold, cooked ham, chopped fine. ¼ a cup of fine bread crumbs.
The yolks of 2 "hard-boiled" eggs.
Two raw eggs.
A few drops of tabasco sauce. ½ a teaspoonful of salt.
Take the bread crumbs from the centre of a stale loaf. Pass the cooked yolks of eggs through a sieve. Add the ham, crumbs, yolks, salt and tabasco to the raw eggs beaten and mixed with the milk. When thoroughly mixed turn into timbale moulds very carefully buttered. Fit papers into the bottoms of the moulds before buttering. Set these in the blazer, surround with hot water, letting it come half way to the top of the moulds. Heat the water to the boiling-point, then set the blazer into the hot-water pan partly filled with boiling water, cover and cook until the mixture is firm in the centre. Serve, turned from the moulds, with cream or tomato sauce, flavored with onion, or with peas heated in a cream sauce.
A savory custard baked — or rather steamed — in small molds, cooked entirely over the chafing dish. The technique transfers directly to a covered saucepan or a low oven.
- The blazer and hot-water panA chafing dish has two vessels: the blazer (the shallow direct-heat pan) and the hot-water pan beneath it, which turns it into a double boiler. Set the molds in the blazer with water halfway up their sides, bring that water to a boil over direct flame, then move the blazer onto the water pan so the custard finishes over gentle indirect heat. A wide lidded skillet or a roasting pan in a 325F oven does the same job.
- Keep it below a boilThis is the hinge. The recipe brings the bath to a boil first over direct flame, then moves the blazer onto the water pan so the cooking finishes gently. Once the surrounding water simmers hard, the egg proteins tighten and the timbales weep and go grainy; hold the bath at a bare quiver and the custard sets smooth.
- Timbale moldsSmall straight-sided molds of about 4 to 5 fl oz — 6-ounce ramekins, custard cups, or a muffin tin work. Butter thoroughly and line the bottom with a disc of parchment as directed; it is the difference between a clean turn-out and a broken one.
- DonenessExpect 25 to 35 minutes for 5-ounce molds. The center should be just set and a knife inserted off-center should come out clean; a slight wobble at the very middle is correct, as it firms as it rests. Let them stand 5 minutes before unmolding.
- HamAny cooked ham, chopped fine rather than ground; ground ham packs and makes the custard dense. Salt levels vary widely between hams, so taste the mixture and consider cutting the half teaspoon of salt in half.
- The hard-boiled yolksSieved cooked yolk is a period thickener and enricher; it gives body without more raw egg. Push it through a fine strainer with the back of a spoon so no lumps remain.
- CrumbsSoft crumbs torn from the inside of a stale loaf, not dried packaged crumbs, which absorb far more liquid and will make the timbales stodgy.
- YieldAbout four to six small timbales depending on mold size, enough for four as a first course or two as a light supper with the peas in cream sauce.
The chafing dish had a real vogue in American households around 1900, when it doubled as a party trick and a way to cook in a room without a stove — hence a whole chapter of dishes engineered to be made over a spirit lamp at the table. The timbale is generally said to take its name from the French for a drum-shaped cup, an explanation usually drawn from the shape of the mold rather than the filling; the form was a standard way of turning small quantities of cooked meat, fish or vegetable into something that could be served in a shape with a sauce. Recipes like this one belong to the era's economy of leftovers, where a cup of yesterday's ham became a course in its own right. Tabasco, made in Louisiana since the 1860s, appears in cookery of this period.