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Timballs Macaroni (Boil the macaroni in water)
610. Boil the macaroni in water, and an ounce of butter. When it has boiled a few moments, strain it off and return it into the pan. Add half a pint of stock; boil it slowly on a stove, till reduced; then prepare a fricassee of chicken, put the macaroni to it, with a little grated parmesan, make all hot, then set it to cool. Butter a mould well, sprinkle it with bread-crumbs, and line it with half puff paste; put in the chicken quite cold; cover and bake it in a slow oven. When done, turn it out of the mould; cut off the top, and pour over some white sauce, and some in the dish.
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A timbale: a buttered, crumbed mould lined with pastry, filled with a cold chicken fricassee bound with macaroni, then baked and turned out. The success of it rests on the filling being properly cold and stiff before it goes into the case.
- The hinge: fill it coldThe instruction to set the filling to cool is not optional. A warm, loose fricassee steams the pastry from the inside and the case collapses when you unmould it. Chill the filling until it holds its shape on a spoon, ideally several hours or overnight.
- The macaroniIn this period macaroni usually meant long, fairly thick tubes, sold in lengths and broken up before cooking. Boil it well short of done -- four or five minutes -- because it goes on absorbing the stock and then bakes again in the mould. Any large tubular pasta works; cut it into inch lengths.
- Half a pint of stockA British half pint is 10 fl oz, about 1 1/4 cups. Use good chicken stock, and reduce it until it barely coats the macaroni rather than pooling in the pan.
- Fricassee of chickenThe recipe assumes you can make one: poached or gently braised chicken, off the bone in bite-sized pieces, bound in a white sauce made from the poaching liquor with a little cream. Season it more assertively than you would for a plated dish, since pastry and pasta both mute salt.
- Oven temperatureA slow oven of the period is usually reckoned somewhere in the region of 275 to 325F, though the book gives no figure. The lower end is too gentle to set puff paste against a metal mould; 325 to 350F for 50 to 60 minutes gives a case firm enough to turn out, with the top covered loosely if it colours early.
- Lining the mouldButter generously, then crumb, then line with a thin sheet of puff pastry pressed well into the base and up the sides with a little overhang. A charlotte mould or a straight-sided 1 1/2-quart pudding basin is the right shape. Chill the lined mould before filling.
- Turning out and finishingRest it five minutes, run a knife round the rim, and invert onto a board rather than the serving dish so the top can be cut off cleanly. The white sauce poured in and around should be thin enough to run \u2half\u2 a light velouté, not a coating consistency.
- YieldA mould of about 1 1/2 quarts should serve roughly six as a main course; the recipe itself gives no yield. It cuts best in wedges, straight down through the pastry.
The timbale takes its name from the drum-shaped mould it is baked in (French timbale, generally traced back through Spanish atabal to an Arabic word for a drum), and by the middle of the nineteenth century the form was familiar in ambitious English dinners drawn from French professional practice. Macaroni was an imported ingredient that still carried a certain cachet in British kitchens of the period, and combining it with a chicken fricassee and Parmesan inside a pastry case is exactly the sort of made dish that let a cook stretch cooked poultry into something worth carrying to the table whole. The instruction to cut off the top and pour sauce inside is characteristic: the pastry drum is presentation as much as vessel.