Home › The Waldorf Kitchen › Timbale of Chickens
Timbale of Chickens
Pick out a couple of fowls of medium size, singe and draw them and remove the pinions and leg bones. Cut each bird into five pieces, not including the backs which are cut in halves; break the thick bones in the legs, take them out and put the legs into a saucepan with the wings; add eight ounces of smoked ham cut up small, three tablespoonfuls of the melted fat of bacon, a bunch of parsley and a few sweet herbs. Set the pan over a brisk fire and add a little seasoning; when they are done and a light color take the chicken and ham out with a skimmer and put them into another saucepan to keep warm on the side of the fire. Put two tablespoonfuls of finely-minced shallot and onion into the saucepan with the liquor, fry them and then add fifteen mushrooms cut in quarters. Place the pan over the fire again and when the moisture is reduced add half a dozen chickens' livers, scalded and cut into halves; four tablespoonfuls of white wine or Madeira and the same quantity of melted glaze. Return the chicken to this saucepan, toss them in the sauce, removing the pan from the fire while so doing, sprinkle a little parsley over them, and let them stand for a little while. In the meanwhile line a timbale mould with short paste and mask it with a layer of raw minced veal or pork mixed with four tablespoonfuls of fine herbs. Put in the pieces of chicken, the ham, livers and mushrooms, spread the top over with more of the raw mince, put a layer of paste on the top, fold the paste over from the sides, put the timbale on a baking sheet, and bake it in a moderate oven for one hour. Remove it when it is done, turn it out, make a small hole in the top, pour in a breakfast cupful of gravy previously reduced with a little Madeira or white wine, and serve quite hot.
Turban of Chickens, Cleveland Style Take two fowls, singe, draw and wipe them well; bone and cut them into quarters; then put them into a sautepan with one ounce of butter, salt and pepper and half a glassful of Madeira wine; boil slowly for ten minutes. Take one breakfast cupful of chicken forcemeat and add to it one chopped truffle, three chopped mushrooms and half an ounce of cooked minced tongue and stir well. Put the forcemeat on a dish, lay the pieces of chicken on top, crownshaped, and decorate with twelve whole mushrooms and two thinly sliced truffles. Add half a pint of Spanish sauce, a teaspoonful of chopped chives and a small pat of fresh butter to the chicken gravy. Pour this immediately over the fowls, put the dish in the oven and cook slowly for ten minutes; squeeze over the juice of half a lemon, and serve with six heart-shaped croutons of fried bread.
Two related dishes run together here: a raised pie of jointed chicken baked in pastry, and a quicker composed "turban" finished in the oven. Both assume a professional larder, so the real work is substituting for the stock reductions and forcemeats Oscar's kitchen had standing by.
- The hinge: glaze and gravy"Melted glaze" is glace de viande, veal or chicken stock reduced to a syrup that sets firm when cold. Without it the filling is watery and the finished timbale collapses when cut. Reduce a quart of good brown chicken stock to about four tablespoons, or use a commercial demi-glace concentrate; the "breakfast cupful of gravy" poured in at the end should be the same stock reduced only to a light coating consistency.
- "Fowl" is not a supermarket chickenA fowl meant a mature laying hen, three to five pounds, with far more connective tissue and flavour than a modern broiler. If you use two 3 1/2-4 lb roasting chickens, the initial browning of legs and wings will be enough; a true stewing hen wants an hour of gentle cooking before it goes into the pastry.
- Oven temperatureA moderate oven is generally reckoned at about 350F, give or take. One hour at that heat suits a filled timbale of this size, but the pastry browns before the centre is hot, so check the middle reads 165F rather than trusting the colour of the crust.
- The mould and the pasteA timbale mould is a straight-sided or slightly tapered drum, here lined with short paste and used as a raised-pie case, not the small custard cup the word suggests today. A 6-7 inch charlotte mould or a deep springform tin works; a hot-water crust holds its shape better than a short paste if you intend to turn it out.
- Raw mince as a liningThe "raw minced veal or pork mixed with fine herbs" is a forcemeat masking that seals the joints and sets into a firm layer. Use about a pound of coarsely ground veal or fatty pork, seasoned well; fines herbes means chopped parsley, chervil, chives and tarragon, not dried mixed herbs.
- Measures and vesselsA breakfast cupful is roughly 8-10 fl oz; a wine glassful, as in the turban, is about 2 fl oz, so "half a glassful" is a tablespoon or two. Three tablespoonfuls of "melted fat of bacon" is simply rendered bacon drippings. The pinions are the wing tips, removed because they burn and add nothing.
- Chicken liversScalding means a brief dip in boiling water to firm them before halving. Add them at the end as directed and give them two or three minutes only; held longer over heat they turn grainy.
- For the turbanSpanish sauce is espagnole, the brown mother sauce; a good reduced demi-glace stands in. Twenty minutes of total cooking assumes small boned pieces from a fowl already at temperature, so verify the chicken reaches 165F before serving rather than following the clock. The truffles are decorative; sliced brown mushrooms give texture but not the aroma.
- YieldTwo fowls, a pound of forcemeat and pastry should serve something like eight to ten as a main course, though the recipe gives no yield. The timbale is better warm than piping hot, and will slice more cleanly if allowed to rest a little after the final gravy goes in.
Oscar Tschirky came to the Waldorf in 1893 as ma tre d'h tel and published his 900-page compendium in 1896, at a moment when American hotel cookery was still working almost entirely inside the French repertoire codified by Car me and his successors. A timbale takes its name from the drum-shaped mould (ultimately from the Arabic tabl, drum), and the raised, pastry-lined version here belongs to the same broad family as the French p t chaud. What the "Cleveland Style" label refers to is unclear avana Oscar gives no explanation. What the pair of recipes really documents is a brigade kitchen: glaze, forcemeat, Spanish sauce and truffles are all treated as things already on hand, which is why the instructions read as assembly rather than cooking.