Home › Entrées › Spaghetti Timbales
Spaghetti Timbales
Line bottom and sides of slightly buttered Dario moulds with long strips of boiled spaghetti coiled around the inside. Fill and bake same as Macaroni Timbales.
A cross-reference recipe: the spaghetti is only the lining, and everything that makes it work happens in the companion recipe for Macaroni Timbales. A few things need translating before you start.
- "Dario moulds"Almost certainly a printer's slip for dariole moulds — small straight-sided cylindrical tins, typically only a few ounces in capacity. Modern equivalents are timbale moulds, dariole tins, or ordinary ramekins; deep muffin cups will do if you butter them well.
- The hinge: cook the spaghetti soft, not al denteThe strands have to coil flat against the buttered sides without cracking or springing back. Boil them a minute or two past the point you would want to eat them, then rinse briefly in cold water so they stay slack and separate while you line the moulds.
- Lining techniqueButter generously, then coil the long strips against the base and up the sides, pressing each turn against the last so no gap shows. The butter helps hold the coil in place until the filling sets.
- What "fill and bake same as" meansThe filling and the baking method both belong to the companion Macaroni Timbales recipe; timbales of this type are generally an egg-bound mixture baked in a pan of hot water so the egg sets gently rather than curdling. If you are working from this line alone, look up the macaroni recipe first; nothing here tells you the filling.
- Oven temperatureThe recipe gives no temperature; it defers entirely to the macaroni recipe. Small moulds in a water bath generally set in 20 to 30 minutes; they are done when the centre is firm to a light touch and a knife comes out clean.
- UnmouldingLet them stand five minutes out of the water before turning out, or the custard is still too loose to hold the spaghetti pattern. Run a thin knife round the rim first.
The timbale — a name often traced to the French for a kettledrum, after the shape of the mould, though the word is also said to come from the French for a metal drinking cup — was a fixture of the multi-course American dinner around 1900, when an entrée meant a small made dish served between the fish and the roast rather than the main event. Lining a mould with a decorative pattern of pasta, aspic, rice or forcemeat and filling the middle with something soft is straight out of the French professional repertoire, simplified for the household cook and her single hired girl. That spaghetti appears at all is worth noting: the book treats it much as it treats macaroni — boiled long, bound with white sauce and cheese, and dressed up in French clothes to earn its place on the menu.