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Lobster Timbales II
1/4 cup stale bread crumbs 1/2 cup heavy cream 2 eggs Sherry wine Salt and pepper Split lobster, remove intestinal vein, liver, and stomach. Crack claw shells with mallet, then remove all meat, scraping as close to shell as possible to obtain the color desired. Force meat through a sieve, add bread crumbs, cream, eggs slightly beaten, and salt, pepper, and Sherry wine to taste. Fill small timbale moulds two-thirds full, place in iron frying-pan, and pour in boiling water to two-thirds the depths of the moulds. Place over moulds buttered paper and cook on the range until firm, keeping water below the boiling-point. Remove from moulds and serve with Hot Mayonnaise (see p. 278). 2 lb. lobster Lobster Cream I 1/2 cup soft stale bread crumbs 1/2 cup milk 1/4 cup cream 2 teaspoons anchovy sauce ½ teaspoon salt Few grains cayenne Whites 3 eggs Remove lobster meat from shell and chop finely. Cook bread and milk ten minutes. Add cream, seasonings, and whites of eggs beaten until stiff. Turn into one slightly buttered timbale mould and two slightly buttered Dario moulds. Bake as Lobster Timbales. Remove to serving dish, having larger mould in centre, smaller moulds one at either end. Pour around Lobster Sauce I, sprinkle with coral rubbed through a sieve, and garnish with pieces of lobster shell from tail, and parsley.
Two related lobster custards run together here by a printing quirk: the ingredient lists and methods have been shuffled, so read carefully before shopping. Both are savory custards set in a water bath, and both live or die by keeping that water below a simmer.
- The garbled layoutThe first block gives crumbs, cream, eggs and Sherry but no lobster; the "2 lb. lobster" line that follows may belong with it, though the second recipe also calls for lobster meat and gives no quantity of its own. Everything from "Lobster Cream I" onward is a second, separate recipe using anchovy sauce and stiffly beaten egg whites.
- The hinge: water below boilingAn egg custard set at a full boil curdles and weeps. Hold the bath water at 170-180F, barely steaming, and the timbales will set smooth. On a modern range that means the lowest setting, or move the pan to a 325F oven.
- Timbale and Dariole mouldsTimbale moulds are small straight-sided metal cups; sizes varied, and darioles are the taller, narrower version -- in the second recipe the timbale mould is the larger of the two. Ramekins or small ovenproof cups work, and buttered paper over the top is the period equivalent of a loose foil cover — it keeps condensation and skin off the surface.
- "Cook on the range until firm"No time is given. Small moulds take about 20-25 minutes; the custard is done when the center is just set and a knife inserted at the edge comes out clean. Overcooking makes lobster custard grainy.
- The coral and the liverThe coral is the dark green roe of a female lobster, which turns coral-red when cooked and was prized as both colorant and garnish. The tomalley (liver) and the sac behind the head are discarded here, as the recipe directs. Lobster bought already cooked and picked will yield no coral at all.
- Anchovy sauceIn this period a thin bottled anchovy essence, not the modern jarred paste. Use about a teaspoon of anchovy paste thinned with a little water in place of the 2 teaspoons called for, and taste before adding the full salt.
- Amount of lobsterA 2-lb live lobster yields roughly 6 to 8 oz of picked meat. Sieving the meat, as the first version instructs, gives a finer custard than chopping; a food processor does the same work faster.
- YieldEach version makes three to four small moulds — a first course for three or four, or a light entrée for two with the sauce.
Timbales were a fixture of the American entrée course around 1900: a savory custard, molded and unmolded, served with a sauce poured around it. The name comes from the French timbale, a drum, for the shape of the mould. The period cookbooks give dozens of them — chicken, sweetbread, spinach, salmon — a form in which expensive protein could be stretched with crumbs, cream and eggs, and still arrive at the table looking composed and formal. The instruction to serve the large mould at the center with two smaller darioles flanking it, ringed with sauce and finished with sieved coral and pieces of tail shell, belongs to the same era's conviction that an entrée should be built as much as cooked.