Important: Safety Warning
This recipe calls for animal brains or related nervous-system tissue. Cattle brain and spinal tissue can transmit bovine spongiform encephalopathy (BSE), the cause of variant Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease in humans, which is fatal and has no treatment.
This information has been left in for historical purposes but should not be acted upon.
Home › Entrées › Sweetbread and Mushroom Timbales
Sweetbread and Mushroom Timbales
Cook two tablespoons butter with one sliced onion five minutes. Add one and one-half cups mushroom caps finely chopped, and one small parboiled sweetbread, finely chopped; then add one cup White Sauce II, one-fourth cup stale bread crumbs, one red pepper chopped, one-half teaspoon salt, yolks two eggs, well beaten, and whites two eggs, beaten until stiff. Fill buttered timbale moulds, set in pan of hot water, cover with buttered paper, and bake fifteen minutes. Remove to serving dish and pour around Mushroom Sauce. Clean five large mushroom caps, cut in halves crosswise, then in slices. Sauté in three tablespoons butter five minutes; dredge with two tablespoons flour, add one-third cup cream and one cup chicken stock, and cook two minutes. Season with salt and paprika, and add one chopped truffle.
A baked mousseline in the French manner, dressed up as a formal entrée. The header warning attached to this page is worth reading against the actual ingredient: sweetbreads are the thymus and pancreas of a calf or lamb, not brain or spinal cord, and they are not classed as specified risk material. The dish is ordinary cooked food.
- Fold the whites in last, and gentlyThe beaten whites are the only lift this mixture has. Fold them into the cooled base off the heat, in two additions, and stop while streaks are still faintly visible. Beat them in and the timbales bake dense and rubbery.
- Preparing the sweetbread"Parboiled" assumes the usual drill: soak in several changes of cold water for an hour or two until pale, simmer 15-20 minutes in acidulated water, then plunge into ice water and peel away the membrane and any gristle. Trimmed weight will vary considerably depending on whether it is veal or lamb.
- White Sauce IIThe book's medium white sauce: roughly equal butter and flour, about 2 tablespoons of each to 1 cup milk, seasoned with salt and pepper. Make it on the thick side, since the eggs and crumbs must set around it.
- Timbale mouldsSmall straight-sided dariole moulds of about 4-6 fl oz. Ramekins or a muffin tin work; butter them heavily and line the bases with buttered parchment rounds if you intend to turn them out.
- Oven and timingNo temperature is given at all; a moderate oven, around 350F, suits a custard baked in a water bath. Fifteen minutes is unlikely to set 5 oz moulds in a water bath; expect 25-35 minutes, until the centres are just firm to a light press and a knife comes out clean. Let them stand five minutes before unmoulding.
- "One red pepper"Genuinely ambiguous. It may mean a mild sweet red pepper or a canned pimiento rather than a chilli, and the quantity suits one small sweet pepper, finely chopped. If you read it as a hot pepper, use a fraction of one.
- The onionCook it soft but colourless, then chop it fine or press it out; whole slices of onion in a delicate custard read as an accident. Some cooks strain the butter and discard the onion altogether, which is closer to modern practice.
- The sauce and the truffleA cup of chicken stock plus a third cup of cream over two tablespoons flour gives a thin pouring sauce - correct here, since it is meant to run around the timbales, not cloak them. Cook it more than the stated two minutes if it tastes of raw flour. The chopped truffle is a garnish of status; a spoonful of good mushroom duxelles does the same work.
- YieldAbout six small timbales, serving four to six as a first course.
A timbale takes its name from the drum-shaped mould it is baked in - the French word derives ultimately from the Arabic al-tabl, a drum - and by the nineteenth century it covered any savoury forcemeat or custard set in such a mould and turned out. Sweetbreads were among the most prized offal of the period, expensive, pale and neutral in flavour, and they appear all through the entrée chapters of American cookbooks precisely because they carried sauces and truffles well and signalled a French kitchen. The entrée itself was then a distinct course served between the fish and the roast, small in portion and elaborate in construction, which is why so much labour here goes into a few ounces of meat. The addition of a chopped truffle to the sauce is the tell: this is a home cook's version of restaurant food, written for households that had read menus they could not afford to eat from nightly.