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Pepper (Melt butter add bread crumbs)
Melt butter, add bread crumbs and milk, and cook five minutes, stirring constantly. Add chicken, parsley, and eggs slightly beaten. Season with salt and pepper. Turn into buttered individual moulds, having moulds two-thirds full set in pan of hot water, cover with buttered paper, and bake twenty minutes. Serve with Béchamel Sauce.
This is a chicken timbale — a savoury custard set in small moulds in a water bath and unmoulded onto the plate. The oven work is short, and the water bath is what keeps the texture silky rather than curdled.
- The hinge: the water bathThe pan of hot water must stay below a simmer. If the water boils, the egg custard sets too fast at the edges, weeps, and turns spongy. Water reaching about halfway up the moulds is enough.
- Oven temperatureThe recipe names none; a moderate oven, roughly 325-350F, suits a water-bath custard. Twenty minutes would suit small ramekins or timbale moulds; a knife blade slipped into the centre should come out clean and the surface should barely tremble.
- MouldsTimbale moulds were straight-sided tin cups. Ceramic ramekins, small custard cups, or a buttered muffin tin all work. Filling them two-thirds full leaves room for the slight rise.
- Buttered paperThis is simply a round of paper buttered on the underside, laid directly on the moulds to stop a skin forming. Parchment does the job; foil works but should not be sealed tightly.
- ProportionsThe recipe as printed gives no quantities. A workable mixture would be roughly equal parts finely chopped cooked chicken, milk and soft bread crumbs, with a little butter and two or three eggs; judge the egg against the liquid rather than the meat, since too little egg and the custard will not hold when turned out.
- ChickenCooked chicken, chopped fine. Breast from a poached bird or a roast carcass both suit; the finer the chop, the less likely the timbale is to break on unmoulding.
- UnmouldingLet the moulds stand two or three minutes out of the water, run a thin knife round the edge, then invert onto a warm plate. Any liquid that collects should be blotted before the sauce goes on.
- Yield and servingNo yield is given; a mixture of this size would likely fill several small moulds, enough for a first course, or a light main. Serve straight from the oven, as reheated timbales toughen.
Timbales take their name from the French timbale, a drum-shaped cup, and by the late nineteenth century the word covered both the mould and the moulded custard turned out of it. They were a mainstay of the entrée course in American cooking-school teaching: cheap, since they used up cooked meat left from a roast bird, but presentable enough to serve to company under a white sauce. Fannie Farmer's Boston Cooking-School Cook Book carries a whole run of them — chicken, fish, sweetbread, spinach — because a single technique of egg, milk, crumbs and water bath could be taught once and then varied endlessly, which was exactly the pedagogical habit that made the book so useful to housekeepers with no French training.