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Melt butter, add onion juice, and cook until slightly browned; then add flour and continue the browning. Pour on, gradually, while stirring constantly, the cream. mushrooms, peal caps, cut in slices lengthwise, and sauté in butter five minutes. Break stems in pieces, cover with cold water, and cook slowly until liquor is reduced to onethird cup; then strain. Dissolve beef extract in mushroom liquor. Add to sauce, and season with salt and paprika. Just before serving, add sautéd caps. 1 lb. halibut Halibut Timbales I 1/3 cup thick cream ¾ teaspoon salt Few grains cayenne 1½ teaspoons lemon juice Whites 3 eggs Cook halibut in boiling salted water, drain, and rub through a sieve. Season with salt, cayenne, and lemon juice; add cream beaten until stiff, then beaten whites of eggs. Turn into small, slightly buttered moulds, put in a pan, half surround with hot water, cover with buttered paper, and bake twenty minutes in a moderate oven. move from moulds, arrange on a serving dish, pour around Béchamel Sauce or Lobster Sauce II, and garnish with parsley. 1 lb. halibut 2/3 cup milk Yolk 1 egg 1¼ teaspoons salt
A classic bain-marie fish custard, bound with whipped cream and egg white rather than flour. The legible portion covers the mushroom sauce and Halibut Timbales I.
- The hinge: gentle, even heatThe timbales set as a custard, so the water bath and the buttered paper cover are not optional. Fierce heat curdles the egg white and forces water out of the fish, leaving a spongy timbale sitting in a puddle.
- Moderate ovenRead this as about 350-375F. Twenty minutes suits the small moulds the recipe calls for; test with the tip of a knife, which should come out clean, and start checking at 15 minutes.
- Fractions in the ingredient listThe salt figure reads as 3/4 teaspoon, and the trailing line of the second halibut recipe as 1 1/4 teaspoons. Lemon juice is 1 1/2 teaspoons.
- Rubbing through a sieveA food processor does this in seconds, but pulse only until smooth. Halibut is lean and over-processing makes the mixture pasty; a sieve breaks the fibres without working them.
- Cream beaten until stiff"Thick cream" here means heavy cream, whipped to soft-to-firm peaks and folded in, not poured in. Fold cream first, then the beaten whites, and stop while streaks are still faintly visible.
- Beef extract in a fish sauceThe mushroom sauce calls for beef extract, meaning a concentrated paste of the Bovril or Liebig type. A teaspoon of a modern beef or mushroom concentrate stands in; add it off the heat and taste before salting, as these products are very salty.
- Mushroom stemsReduce the stem liquor to a third of a cup at a bare simmer; the recipe gives no starting quantity of water, so judge by volume rather than by the clock. It carries much of the sauce's flavour, so do not discard the stems and substitute water.
- Onion juiceGrate a piece of onion on a fine grater and use the liquid that collects. It gives onion flavour without specks in a pale sauce.
- YieldA pound of halibut fills six to eight small moulds, enough for four as a first course or an entree in the older sense of a light made dish served between heavier courses.
Timbales are generally said to take their name from the French timbale, which means a kettledrum and also a metal cup, the mould's name traditionally traced to the shape of the small straight-sided vessel. In American cooking schools of the 1890s and 1900s they seem to have been something of a set piece: a way of teaching students to bind, season and unmould a delicate mixture, and a way of stretching a modest quantity of expensive fish into a dish that looked composed on the plate. Fannie Farmer's book gives them their own run of pages, and this one sits among the fish sauces — Bechamel, Lobster Sauce II — with a pale sauce poured around rather than over so the moulds stay visible. Halibut suited the method because it is lean, firm and white; the whipped cream and beaten whites are there to lighten a purée that would otherwise set dense.