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Lobster Cream II
1 cup chopped lobster meat 1 tablespoon butter 1 tablespoon flour 1 teaspoon salt 1/8 teaspoon paprika Few drops onion juice 2 egg yolks 1/3 cup milk 1/3 cup heavy cream White one egg, beaten stiff Cook lobster meat with butter five minutes. Add flour, seasonings, egg yolks, milk, cream beaten until stiff, and white of egg. Fill buttered timbale moulds three-fourths full, set in pan of hot water, cover with buttered paper, and bake until firm. Serve with Lobster Sauce.
Chicken Timbales I Garnish slightly buttered Dario moulds with chopped truffles or slices of truffles cut in fancy shapes. Line with Chicken Force-meat I, fill centres with Creamed Chicken and Mushrooms, to which has been added a few chopped truffles. Cover with Force-meat, and bake same as Lobster Timbales Serve with Béchamel or Yellow Béchamel Sauce. 2 tablespoons butter
A savory baked custard set in a water bath — the sort of small entrée that filled the middle of a long Victorian menu. The instructions are compressed almost to shorthand, and the printed page runs on into an unrelated chicken recipe.
- Read the order of operations carefullyThe sentence lists ingredients faster than it explains them: cook the lobster in the butter, stir in flour and seasonings, then beat in the yolks and milk, fold in the whipped cream, and fold in the stiff egg white last. "Cream beaten until stiff" means the heavy cream is whipped before it goes in, not boiled with the rest.
- Where the recipe endsEverything from "Chicken Timbales I" onward belongs to the next entry, as does the stray "2 tablespoons butter." Ignore it for this dish.
- Timbale mouldsSmall straight-sided metal or china moulds, commonly somewhere around 1/3 to 1/2 cup. Ramekins, custard cups, or a muffin tin all work; fill three-fourths full as directed so the custard has room to rise.
- Oven temperatureThe book says only "bake until firm" and gives no heat. A moderate oven, around 325-350F in modern terms, suits a custard; much hotter risks curdling and weeping even in a water bath. Small moulds will likely want somewhere in the region of 20-30 minutes -- firm at the edge, barely trembling at the centre, and a knife inserted off-centre coming out clean.
- Buttered paperA round of parchment, buttered side down, laid loosely over the moulds. It keeps a skin from forming and stops the tops browning; foil does the same job.
- Onion juiceAn old dodge for onion flavour without texture: grate a peeled onion on a fine grater and use the liquid that collects. A few drops is genuinely all that is wanted.
- Lobster quantityA cup of chopped meat is roughly 5-6 oz, about the yield of a lobster of 1 1/2 lb or somewhat more. Cooked meat is intended here; the five minutes in butter is for flavour, not to cook it through.
- YieldPerhaps six to eight small timbales depending on the mould; a course rather than a main dish. The Lobster Sauce called for is a separate recipe elsewhere in the same book, a butter-and-flour white sauce enriched with lobster; a light bechamel stands in acceptably.
Timbales -- the word is French for a kettledrum, and the shape of the mould is the usual explanation for the name -- were a fixture of American genteel cooking around 1900, and Fannie Farmer's book gives several of them: lobster, chicken, sweetbread, spinach, halibut. Their appeal was structural as much as culinary: a formal dinner needed an entree between the fish and the roast, and a small moulded custard could be prepared in advance, unmoulded neatly, and sauced at the last minute. That this recipe sits alongside "Lobster Timbales" and several chicken versions shows how systematically the Boston Cooking School treated its recipes as variations on a method rather than as separate dishes.