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Egg and Cheese Timbales
Beat six eggs very light and add to them one-half cup of warm milk, in which a pinch of soda has been dissolved, five tablespoons of grated cheese and a pinch, each, of paprika and salt. Butter small timbale molds, or pâté pans, fill with the egg mixture and set in a baking-pan of boiling water until the egg is set. Turn out carefully on a hot platter and pour hot tomato sauce about them. Serve at once, as they soon fall.
A custard, not a soufflé, despite the warning that they fall. The whole job is cooking the egg gently enough that it sets smooth rather than weeping.
- The hinge: water-bath temperatureThe water around the molds should stay below a simmer the whole time; water kept at a hard boil will drive the custard past setting into a curdled, weeping mess. Bring the water to a boil as directed, pour it around the molds, then hold it steady and gentle -- a moderate oven does this more reliably than a burner.
- Timbale moldsSmall straight-sided metal cups, commonly somewhere between about 2 and 4 fl oz. Ceramic ramekins or a muffin tin of similar capacity work; butter them well and, if you want a clean turn-out, line the bottoms with buttered parchment rounds.
- DonenessTwenty to thirty minutes for 4-oz molds. The centers should register 170-175F and wobble as a single mass, not slosh. Let them stand two or three minutes before unmolding or they will slump.
- The pinch of sodaProbably meant to keep the milk from curdling against the acid in aged cheese, a common period habit. It does little harm in a pinch, but the custard sets perfectly well without it, and too much gives a soapy taste and a greenish cast.
- Grated cheeseIn this period the phrase meant a dry, sharp cheese that grated to powder: aged American or Cheddar, or Parmesan. Five tablespoons is about 1 to 1.5 oz. Avoid anything young and rubbery; it will string rather than dissolve into the custard.
- Beating the eggs"Very light" means beaten until light and uniform. Air beaten in will make the timbales puff and then collapse, which may be why the original tells you to serve at once.
- YieldSix eggs and half a cup of milk make roughly 15 fl oz of mixture: about four 4-oz molds, or more if the molds are smaller. A light lunch for two to four with the tomato sauce.
Timbales take their name from the French timbale, a word that denotes both a kettledrum and a metal drinking cup; the culinary sense is usually traced to the cup. By the turn of the twentieth century the word in American cookbooks covered almost anything savory baked in a small cup and turned out. The Butterick Publishing Company, better known for dress patterns and The Delineator, issued its cook book for the same audience it sold sewing patterns to: middle-class households running on one servant or none, who wanted the shape of a French menu without the staff. A dish like this is the whole strategy in miniature -- eggs, milk and a scrap of cheese, molded and sauced, arriving at the table looking like a course rather than a supper. Cheese-and-egg dishes filled the meatless place in a period menu, and a chapter of them was standard in general cook books of the 1900s and 1910s.