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Rice Timbales
Pack hot boiled rice in slightly buttered small tin moulds. Let stand in hot water ten minutes. Use as a garnish for curried meat, fricassee, or boiled fowl.
A garnish rather than a dish, and one of the shortest entries in Farmer's book. The only real technique is packing the rice tightly enough that the moulds turn out clean.
- The moulds"Small tin moulds" most likely means individual dariole or timbale cups, probably somewhere around 1/3 to 1/2 cup capacity, though the book gives no size. Small ramekins, muffin cups, or even teacups will serve; a straight or slightly tapered side unmoulds most reliably.
- The hinge: pack while very hotThe rice has to be steaming hot and pressed down hard with the back of a wet spoon. Cool or loosely packed rice will not hold its shape and will collapse the moment it is turned out.
- Choose a sticky riceFarmer's boiled rice was washed, cooked soft in plenty of water and drained. A medium- or short-grain rice will cling naturally; a rinsed long-grain such as basmati is much less likely to hold together.
- "Let stand in hot water"The book does not say how; presumably the filled moulds stand in a pan of hot water off direct heat or over the barest flame, to hold their temperature and let the grains settle. Ten minutes is what is given.
- UnmouldingRun a thin knife around the edge, invert onto the warm platter, and lift the mould straight up. Butter the moulds lightly but completely, corners included.
- YieldThe recipe gives no yield. On the mould size guessed above, roughly 2 cups of cooked rice would fill four to six moulds.
Timbale, from the French for a kettledrum and, by extension, the drum-shaped cup itself, described any food moulded in such a vessel, and by the 1890s American cookbooks applied it to everything from creamed chicken in pastry cases to this plain rice garnish. Its presence in Fannie Farmer's 1896 book reflects a period when the visual arrangement of a dish carried real weight: a fricassee or curry was expected to arrive ringed with something shapely rather than spooned over a mound of rice. The technique is the same one behind the rice rings and border moulds that fill period cookbooks, scaled down to one portion each.