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Pear Timbale with Raisins
Butter a timbale-mould and line it with short paste. Peel, core and mince twelve pears, put them in a preserving-pan with a piece of butter, and cook them over a slow fire till half done. Put in with the pears a quarter of a stick of vanilla, two breakfast cupfuls of picked Smyrna raisins, previously softened in warm water, three tablespoonfuls of apricot marmalade, and a small quantity of sugar. When done leave the pears to cool. Dilute a little apricot marmalade with kircsh. Fill the lined mould with the pears, put a flat of the same paste over it and bake it in a slack oven for three-fourths of an hour. When done, turn the timbales on a dish, sprinkle over some chopped pistachios, pour over the apricot sauce, and serve.
A lined, lidded pastry case baked in a drum-shaped mould, turned out and sauced. Nothing here is difficult, but the fruit has to be cooked down properly or the crust will collapse when you invert it.
- Cook the pears dryThis is the hinge. Twelve pears release a great deal of juice, and "half done" over a slow fire is not enough on its own — keep the pan uncovered and reduce until the mince holds its shape on a spoon. Wet filling means a soaked bottom crust and a timbale that will not turn out.
- The mouldA timbale-mould is a straight-sided or slightly tapered metal drum; sizes vary, but something on the order of a 2-quart charlotte mould, a deep cake tin with straight sides, or a tall soufflé dish will serve. Butter it well and line the base with a disc of parchment if you want insurance on the unmolding.
- Slack ovenThe cool end of the range, somewhere around 275-325°F. Three-quarters of an hour at that heat should cook the paste through without colouring it much, which matters since the whole thing is inverted and sauced.
- Breakfast cupfulA breakfast cup is larger than a teacup — reckon a generous 8 fl oz, so two cupfuls is roughly 10 to 12 oz of raisins by weight. Smyrna raisins were the seedless sultana-type raisins shipped from Izmir; sultanas or golden raisins are the nearest modern substitute.
- Short paste and preserving-panShort paste is a plain sweet shortcrust, not puff. A preserving-pan is simply a wide, heavy, unlidded pan — the shape is for evaporation, so use your widest sauté pan or a Dutch oven with the lid off.
- Vanilla and marmaladeA quarter stick of vanilla is about a 1½-inch length of bean, split and dropped in whole, then fished out before filling the mould. "Apricot marmalade" here means apricot jam; sieve it if it is chunky, since the sauce should pour.
- The kirsch sauceThin the jam with kirsch off the heat and warm it only gently, or the spirit cooks away and takes the point with it. A tablespoon or two of kirsch to a half cup of jam gives a sauce that pours.
- Turning outLet the baked timbale settle 15 to 20 minutes before inverting — hot from the oven the paste is fragile and the filling still loose. Run a knife round the rim first.
- YieldTwelve pears is roughly 4 to 5 lb of fruit; the finished timbale should serve eight to ten. The recipe slips into the plural at the end ("turn the timbales"), which may be no more than a printer's slip.
Oscar Tschirky, maître d'hôtel of the Waldorf and later the Waldorf-Astoria, put his name to a large 1896 compendium of the hotel's cooking, and the pastry chapters read as straight French repertoire of the period. A timbale takes its name from the drum-shaped mould (generally traced to the Arabic ṭabl, a drum, by way of Spanish atabal and then French), and the word covered both savoury and sweet preparations baked in one. The Smyrna raisins specified point to the late-nineteenth-century trade in seedless sultanas out of Izmir, often said to have been the standard fine raisin in American hotel kitchens, while the apricot glaze thinned with kirsch is generally described as the usual finish for moulded fruit desserts in kitchens working in the Carême-to-Escoffier line.