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Swedish Timbales
3/4 cup flour ½ teaspoon salt 1 teaspoon sugar 1/2 cup milk 1 egg 1 tablespoon olive oil Mix dry ingredients, add milk gradually, and beaten egg; then add olive oil. Shape, using a hot timbale iron, fry in deep fat until crisp and brown; take from iron and invert on brown paper to drain.
To Heat Timbale Iron. Heat fat until nearly hot enough to fry uncooked mixtures. Put iron into hot fat, having fat deep enough to more than cover it, and let stand until heated. The only way of knowing when iron is of right temperature is to take it from fat, shake what fat may drip from it, lower in batter to three-fourths its depth, raise from batter, then immerse in hot fat. If batter does not cling to iron, or drops from iron as soon as immersed in fat, it is either too hot or not sufficiently heated.
To Form Timbales. Turn timbale batter into a cup.
Lower hot iron into cup, taking care that batter covers iron to only three-fourths its depth. When immersed in fat, mixture will rise to top of iron, and when crisp and brown may be easily slipped off. If too much batter is used, in cooking it will rise over top of iron, and in order to remove timbale it must be cut around with a sharp knife close to top of iron. If the cases are soft rather than crisp, batter is too thick and must be diluted with milk.
Fill cases with Creamed Oysters, Chicken, Sweetbreads, or Chicken and Sweetbreads in combination with Mushrooms.
A thin batter fried on a heated iron to make a crisp shell for creamed fillings. Everything depends on the iron: its temperature, and how deep you dip it.
- The hinge: iron temperatureThe iron must be hot enough that batter clings and sets on contact, but not so hot that batter slides off. If the batter refuses to adhere, dry the iron on paper, reheat it in the fat, and try again. This is the whole technique, and the original explains it better than most modern sources.
- The timbale ironSold today as a rosette or timbale iron, usually a set of interchangeable heads on a long handle. Cup-shaped heads give cases you can fill; flat fluted heads give rosettes for dusting with sugar. Both work with this batter.
- Fat temperature"Nearly hot enough to fry uncooked mixtures" is the book's own relative test, not a thermometer reading; in modern terms it lands somewhere just under the usual deep-frying range for raw batters. Too cool and the cases absorb fat and go limp; too hot and they brown before they crisp. Lard and beef-fat compounds were common frying fats of the period; any neutral oil with a high smoke point does the same job.
- The saltA teaspoon and a half of salt to three-quarters of a cup of flour reads as salty by modern standards, especially for a case that will hold a creamed filling. Half a teaspoon is closer to current practice if you are using ordinary table salt.
- Batter consistencyThe book's diagnostic is sound: soft, non-crisp cases mean the batter is too thick, so thin it with milk a spoonful at a time. The original gives no target consistency.
- Depth of dipThree-quarters of the iron's depth, no more. Batter that laps over the rim locks the case onto the iron and you will be cutting it free with a knife each time, which wastes the case and cools the iron.
- Yield and holdingThe recipe gives no yield; the number of cases depends entirely on the size of the iron. Fill them only at the moment of serving, or the creamed filling softens the shell.
- ServingThe suggested fillings put this in the entree course, a made dish served between fish and roast in period service. Unsweetened, the same shells hold anything creamed, from mushrooms to curried eggs.
The timbale iron is often said to have reached American kitchens through Scandinavian immigrants, and the name attached to the recipe here reflects a related lineage: the same tool and a nearly identical batter produce the Swedish struva and the Norwegian rosette, traditionally fried at Christmas and dusted with sugar. In Fannie Farmer's version the sugar is stripped back to a single teaspoon and the shell serves as savoury tableware, a crisp disposable vessel for the creamed oysters, chicken and sweetbreads that filled the entr"'e'"e course of a turn-of-the-century American dinner. That course was itself a borrowing from French service, and the fashion for serving creamed mixtures in an edible container of some kind, whether pastry, bread or fried batter, runs right through the cookbooks of the 1890s and 1900s. The insistence on precise diagnostic tests here, including how to tell an iron is at the right heat and what a soft case means about the batter, is characteristic of the Boston Cooking School method, which treated cooking as a set of repeatable procedures rather than inherited knack.