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EGG TIMBALES (Make a white sauce by rubbing)
Make a white sauce by rubbing together one tablespoon each of butter and flour and adding two-thirds cup of scalded milk and the slightly beaten yolks of three eggs. Season with salt, pepper, one tablespoon chopped parsley and a few grains each of cayenne and celery salt. Beat the whites of the eggs very stiff and fold into the first mixture. Butter individual molds and fill with the mixture. Place in a dripping-pan of hot water and bake in a moderate oven until firm. Arrange on a platter and serve with Tomato Cream Sauce. See Chapter on Sauces for Fish, Meat, Poultry and Game.
DEVILLED EGGS, No. 1-Take twelve eggs; two heaping tablespoons of cold boiled ham; one tablespoon of olive oil; one teaspoon of mustard; salt and pepper to taste. Boil the eggs fifteen minutes and lay them in cold water for one-half an hour. Remove the shells and cut the eggs in halves lengthwise. Rub the yolks to a smooth paste with the oil and mustard, add the ham, finely chopped, and the salt and pepper; mix thoroughly, and fill the hollowed whites with the mixture. Serve in a bed of water-cress or salad. For picnics, put the corresponding halves of each egg together and press them closely; then cut white oiled paper into pieces six inches square, roll one egg into each paper, and twist the ends the same as the coverings of bonbons are often arranged. DEVILLED EGGS (Hot), No. 2-Roll six devilled eggs in the beaten white of an egg and then in cracker crumbs until they are well covered. Fry in one teaspoon of butter and one of lard until brown. Serve on lettuce leaves.
DEVILLED EGGS, No. 3-This is such a useful dish for an emergency meal that it deserves special mention. Boil six eggs for fully fifteen minutes. Wet one tablespoon of flour in a little cold milk, and cook it in one coffee-cup of milk. Season with a scanty half teaspoon of salt, one-half saltspoon of white pepper and, if liked, one teaspoon of onion juice; or one teaspoon of celery salt may be used instead of plain salt. Halve the eggs, cut rings from the whites, and chop the solid ends. Stir the chopped portions into the white sauce, divide the halves of the yolks once more, and stir these pieces lightly into the sauce; pour the whole upon a wide dish, lay the rings upon the preparation, and serve. Half a can of divided small mushrooms will prove an agreeable addition to the sauce of devilled eggs, and when they are used no other flavor than salt is required. The juice of the mushrooms may be used to dissolve the flour instead of milk.
Four separate preparations run together on one page: a baked egg timbale and three treatments of hard-boiled eggs. The timbale is the only one that needs real technique.
- The hinge: gentle, even heatThe timbale is a savoury custard lightened with beaten whites. It sets in the water bath at around 350F (the book's "moderate oven") in roughly 20 to 25 minutes for small molds; test with a knife tip near the centre, which should come out clean. Let the water in the pan come partway up the molds and do not let it boil, or the custards will puff, weep and turn coarse.
- Dripping-panA shallow roasting pan. Any pan deep enough to hold an inch or two of hot water around the molds will do; ramekins or dariole molds stand in for "individual molds."and butter them generously so the timbales turn out clean.
- Scalded milkMilk heated to just below the boil, until it steams and shivers at the edges. With pasteurised milk this is no longer about safety, but warming it before it meets the roux still gives a smoother sauce and helps the yolks thicken without curdling.
- Coffee-cup and saltspoonA coffee-cup in this period is about one cup, though the vessels were not standardised. A saltspoon is a quarter teaspoon, so "one-half saltspoon of white pepper" is an eighth of a teaspoon. "A few grains" of cayenne means a pinch — less than an eighth teaspoon.
- Fifteen minutes is too long for the eggsBoth devilled egg recipes call for a full quarter hour of boiling. That produces the grey-green ring at the yolk's edge and a sulphurous edge to the flavour. Twelve minutes off the heat in covered water, then straight into cold, gives a firm yolk without the discolouration — the cold-water soak the book calls for is exactly right, and it makes peeling far easier.
- YieldThe timbale mixture, built on three eggs, fills about four small molds and serves two to four as a first course. Devilled Eggs No. 1 gives twenty-four halves; No. 3 serves three or four as a supper dish.
- White oiled paperThe picnic wrapping was paper treated with oil to resist grease. Parchment does the same job, and the twisted-bonbon fold still works; keep filled eggs cold in transit, since a mayonnaise-free filling of oil and mustard is stable but the eggs themselves are not.
- Canned mushroomsThe half can of small mushrooms in No. 3, drained with its liquor saved to slake the flour, shows canned goods being treated as an ordinary kitchen resource by 1911. Sauteed fresh mushrooms are better eating, but they will not give you the savoury canning liquid the recipe wants as a thickening base.
Timbales — from the French timbale, a drum-shaped cup, whose origins are generally traced back through Spanish atabal to the Arabic tabl — were a fixture of turn-of-the-century American cookery precisely because they let a household stretch three eggs into a dish that looked like restaurant food when unmolded onto a platter. The Butterick Cook Book (1911) came from a pattern and magazine publisher, and the egg chapter is full of mold work that reads elegant but costs almost nothing. Devilled eggs, meanwhile, descend from the much older practice of "devilling," which since the early nineteenth century meant simply seasoning sharply with mustard and cayenne; the frank note that No. 3 "deserves special mention" as an emergency meal is the book at its most useful, and the mushroom variation shows how quickly canned goods had become an ordinary kitchen resource.