Home › Entrées › Chicken Timbales III
Chicken Timbales III
Soak one-half tablespoon granulated gelatine in one and one-half tablespoons cold water, and dissolve in three-fourths cup chicken stock. Add one cup chopped cooked chicken, and stir until the mixture begins to thicken, then add one cup cream beaten until thick. Add one tablespoon Sherry wine and a few grains cayenne. Mould, chill, and serve on lettuce leaves.
A cold chicken mousse set with gelatine, despite the name — no custard, no baking, no water bath. The whole thing succeeds or fails on the temperature at which the whipped cream goes in.
- The hinge: fold at the syrupy stage"Stir until the mixture begins to thicken" means chilling the stock-and-chicken mixture, ideally in a bowl set over ice, until it has the body of raw egg white. Fold the cream in earlier and it will separate into a rubbery jelly layer under a foam; fold it in later and the mixture will already be set and will break up.
- Gelatine quantitiesHalf a tablespoon of granulated gelatine is 1½ teaspoons, about two-thirds of a modern ¼-oz envelope. It is setting roughly three-quarters cup stock plus a cup of cream, so the result is deliberately soft — sliceable but tender. Bloom it the full five minutes in the cold water before adding the hot stock.
- Dissolving the gelatineThe chicken stock must be hot enough to dissolve the granules completely — heat it to a simmer, then take it off and stir the bloomed gelatine in. Undissolved grains show up as gritty specks that never disappear.
- Cream beaten until thickSoft peaks, not stiff. Stiffly whipped cream will not fold evenly into a gelatine base and leaves white streaks. Use cream with 35% fat or more; modern ultra-pasteurised whipping cream works but whips slower.
- Season more than seems rightThe original relies on the stock for salt, and cold sets taste flatter than warm food. Season the stock assertively before the gelatine goes in, and taste the mixture again just before moulding.
- Moulds and yieldTimbale moulds are small dariole cups of about ⅓ cup each. Rinse the moulds in cold water rather than oiling them, and unmould by dipping briefly in warm — not hot — water.
- Chilling timeNo time is given. Allow at least four hours in the refrigerator, or overnight for a clean unmoulding. Keep the timbales cold until they go to the table; a cream-and-stock mixture should not sit out.
- The chickenChop the cooked meat fine — a coarse dice sinks through the soft set. Poached breast and thigh together give better flavour than breast alone, and a tablespoon of Sherry is a fino or amontillado, not a sweetened cooking sherry.
Timbale is the French word for a kettledrum and also for a drum-shaped cup, and the culinary sense is traditionally explained by the shape of the mould; in nineteenth-century kitchens the term covered anything set or baked in one — custard-bound purées, rice cases, forcemeats. That this third variation is a cold gelatine mousse rather than a baked custard fits the period: packaged granulated gelatine had become widely available by the 1890s, saving the labour of boiling down calves' feet, and moulded salads and cold entrées became common in American cookbooks. The dish belongs to the ladies' luncheon table — cold, pale, portioned, served on lettuce, and a tidy use for the remains of a boiled fowl.