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Timbale Cases
1 teaspoon sugar
1 tablespoon oil
½ teaspoon salt
½ cup milk
¾ cup flour
Fat for frying
1 egg
Mix sugar, salt and sifted flour. Add the well-beaten egg, oil and milk. Beat with an egg-beater until perfectly smooth, then strain. This should be made an hour before it is needed and set aside in a cool place to lose the air which has been beaten into it. Pour into a cup that is deep enough to allow the timbale iron to be lowered into it to the required depth without touching the bottom.
Have ready a kettle of fat, place the iron in it and heat until the fat is hot enough to brown a piece of bread while counting forty. The fat should be deep enough to more than cover the mold end of the iron. When the iron is heated, take out, remove surplus fat, using crumpled tissue-paper, and lower into batter until iron is covered to not more than three-fourths of its height. This is necessary to allow for the rise of the batter in cooking. If only a thin layer of the batter adheres to the mold, dip it into the batter again until there is a smooth layer of the partly seconds. cooked batter. Plunge quickly into hot fat and cook for about twelve When properly cooked, the timbale case should slip easily from the mold. Place the finished case on absorbent paper to drain and continue the operation until the required number are made. A fluted timbale iron is easier to work with, as the case does not slip off until thoroughly cooked. If the cases are not crisp, the batter is too thick and should be diluted with milk. These cases may be used with great variety. They may be filled with a choice creamed vegetable, or with creamed oysters, chicken or sweetbreads, or they may be filled with fresh or cooked fruit topped with whipped cream or powdered sugar, and served as a sweet course.
A rosette-iron batter, essentially a thin unleavened crêpe batter stiff enough to cling to hot metal. The whole thing hinges on the temperature of the iron and the thickness of the batter.
- The garbled timingThe typesetting has scrambled a line: the batter is cooked "for about twelve seconds" (the words "seconds" and "twelve" have jumped out of place). Twelve to twenty seconds in the fat is right — pull the case the moment it stops bubbling hard and turns pale gold.
- Fat temperature"Hot enough to brown a piece of bread while counting forty" points to somewhere in the region of 360–375°F, though how fast a cook counted was never standardised. Cooler than that and the cases absorb fat and go limp; hotter and they darken before the batter sets and stick to the mould.
- The ironA timbale iron is the cup-shaped head found today in the sets sold as rosette irons: a cast metal head on a long handle. The head is heated in the fat and wiped free of surplus fat, or the batter will not adhere.
- Why the batter restsThe hour in a cool place lets the beaten-in air escape and the flour hydrate. An aerated batter blisters off the iron in patches; a rested one coats evenly. Straining removes lumps that would make thick spots.
- Three-quarters depthDipping the iron no more than three-quarters up matters: batter climbs as it cooks, and a case dipped deeper comes out with a rolled lip that will not release.
- Releasing the caseIf a case clings, a light tap of the iron against the side of the kettle usually frees it. A fork worked between metal and batter tears them; the recipe's advice about fluted irons is sound, since the flutes give the case something to hold until it is set.
- YieldThe quantity given — ¾ cup flour, 1 egg, ½ cup milk — will make a dozen or more small cases, depending on the size of the iron. Fry them all, then warm them briefly in a low oven before filling.
- Filling and holdingFill only at the moment of serving; creamed oysters or chicken will soften the shell within minutes. Unfilled cases keep two or three days airtight, and freeze well.
Timbale cases belong to a category of American cooking that prized the appearance of French service on a household budget: a fried batter shell standing in for the pastry croustade or the moulded timbale proper, which in French usage means a drum-shaped mould and, by extension, whatever is cooked in it. Irons of this type are often said to have been a common mail-order kitchen item in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, sold alongside the patty pans and jelly moulds that let a cook present leftovers as an entrée. A cupful of yesterday's creamed chicken, poured into a crisp fluted shell, reappeared as a course rather than a remnant. The same irons survive in Scandinavian-American kitchens as rosette irons, used for the sugared Christmas cookies made from a nearly identical batter.