Home › Sauces › Asparagus Timbales
Asparagus Timbales
Cut the points from the asparagus as far as they are perfectly tender, cutting in bits about one-half inch long. Wash thoroughly, and put them into boiling water with one teaspoon of salt to each two quarts of water. Boil rapidly for ten minutes and drain thoroughly. In the meantime cover one pint of bread crumbs with one gill of hot milk. Let this stand until the crumbs are soft, then beat with a fork until free from lumps. Add three eggs, one at a time, and mix well together. Stir in one saltspoon of salt, a dash of cayenne, three tablespoons of melted butter, and one tablespoon of onion juice. When well mixed stir in carefully one pint of asparagus tips. Butter small timbale molds holding about one gill, sprinkle with finely minced parsley and two-thirds fill the molds. Set in a baking-pan of boiling water, not enough, however, to reach the top. Cover with a sheet of buttered paper and cook in the oven for twenty minutes. Invert on a heated platter, garnish with parsley and serve with a white sauce.
A savory vegetable custard baked in a water bath — straightforward once the archaic measures are translated. The hinge is oven temperature: this is a custard, and it must never approach a boil in the mold or it will curdle and weep.
- GillOne gill is half a cup (4 fl oz). So the hot milk is 1/2 cup, and the molds are 4-oz ramekins or dariole molds.
- SaltspoonA saltspoon is 1/4 teaspoon.
- Oven temperatureThe original gives none. Bake the water bath at 325-350F. Above that the custards puff, then collapse and separate when turned out.
- Bread crumbsA pint of crumbs here means soft fresh crumbs torn or grated from the inside of a stale loaf, not dry packaged crumbs. Dry crumbs will absorb the half cup of milk and give you a paste rather than a custard; if that is all you have, use closer to a cup of milk and soak longer.
- The asparagus boilTen minutes of hard boiling was normal in cookbooks of this period and produces olive-drab, limp tips that then bake for another twenty. Three to four minutes in salted water, then a thorough drain, leaves them green and intact through the baking.
- Onion juiceGrate a peeled onion on the fine side of a box grater and press the pulp through a sieve; a tablespoon takes about half a medium onion. Not the same as minced onion, which stays raw and crunchy in a twenty-minute custard.
- Buttered paperButtered parchment cut to fit the pan, or foil. It keeps steam off the tops so they do not skin over.
- Doneness and yieldTwenty minutes suits 4-oz molds two-thirds filled; the centers should be just set and barely wobbling. Let them stand five minutes before inverting or they will slump. The yield is hard to pin down, but the pint of tips alone will nearly fill six 4-oz molds two-thirds full, so expect appreciably more than six molds once the crumbs, eggs and butter are added.
- The white sauceA plain flour-and-butter béchamel, thinned to coating consistency.
The timbale takes its name from the French timbale, a drum-shaped metal cup (the word is generally traced back to Arabic tabl, a drum), and by the late nineteenth century it meant both the mold and anything set in it. Molded, unmolded, garnished food was a signature of the period's aspirational cooking: it turned a cheap ingredient stretched with bread crumbs and eggs into something that could be inverted onto a hot platter and sauced. The Butterick Publishing Company, better known for dress patterns, was selling exactly that promise to middle-class American households — French forms achieved with a domestic budget and no professional staff. Asparagus was still largely a spring crop with a short local season.