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Pimento Timbales
Line small timbale moulds with canned pimentoes. Fill with Chicken Timbale II mixture (see p. 366), and bake until firm. Remove from moulds, insert a sprig of parsley in top of each, and serve with
A pimento-lined chicken forcemeat baked in individual moulds. The text is elliptical even by Farmer's standards, and the sauce it points to has been cut off mid-sentence; almost everything you need to know lives in the cross-referenced Chicken Timbale II.
- The hinge: gentle, moist heatA timbale of this kind is a custard held together by egg and cream; the recipe gives neither temperature nor water bath, but such mixtures were conventionally baked in a pan of hot water in a moderate oven, and direct dry heat tends to curdle them so they weep when turned out. "Bake until firm" means the center no longer trembles and a knife inserted off-center comes out clean -- in small moulds, somewhere in the region of 20 to 25 minutes.
- Timbale mouldsSmall moulds of the period were of roughly third-cup capacity. Buttered 4-oz ramekins, dariole moulds or a deep muffin tin all work; the number you get will depend on the size of the Chicken Timbale II batch on p. 366.
- Canned pimentoesThese are whole skinned sweet red peppers packed in brine, not the chopped pimiento of stuffed olives and cheese spread. Jarred whole roasted red peppers are the direct substitute. Drain them, open them out flat, blot them dry, then press them smooth against the buttered mould so the finished timbale unmoulds in a solid red jacket rather than sliding around in its own liquid.
- The forcemeatChicken Timbale II is pounded or ground raw or cooked chicken bound with egg and cream, seasoned and often sieved. A food processor does in thirty seconds what the original assumed of a mortar, but stop as soon as it is smooth; overworking warms the cream and the mixture will break in the oven.
- UnmouldingLet the moulds stand out of the water bath for five minutes so the custard settles, run a thin knife around the rim, then invert onto the warmed serving dish. Standing longer than about ten minutes makes them sweat and slip.
- The missing sauceThe page breaks off at "serve with." Timbales of this kind were commonly served with a white or Béchamel sauce, a mushroom sauce, or Hollandaise; any of those is in period. A thin sauce pooled under the timbales, rather than poured over, keeps the pimento lining visible.
- SeasoningChicken forcemeat plus cream plus sweet pepper is a mild set of flavors. Salt the mixture more assertively than instinct suggests and taste a spoonful cooked in simmering water before you fill the moulds; a baked custard cannot be corrected afterward.
Timbale is French for kettledrum, and by extension a drum-shaped cup or mould; in cookery it came to mean anything baked in such a mould, from pastry cases to the smooth bound purées of chicken, fish or sweetbreads that filled the entrée chapters of many genteel American cookbooks around 1900. They were small, pale, soft and unmistakably shaped, and could be eaten without effort at a ladies' luncheon. The pimento lining marks the date: whole canned Spanish sweet peppers reached American grocers in quantity in the 1890s and early 1900s, and Georgia growers are generally said to have taken up the crop somewhat later, the canning industry there usually dated to the 1910s, which put a bright, cheap, ready-peeled red into the hands of cooks who had previously had to blister and skin their own. Farmer uses it here as pure color, a scarlet wrapper on a white pudding with a green sprig on top, and the recipe is really a variation note rather than a dish in its own right, which is why it runs only four lines and sends you elsewhere for the substance.