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Timbales of Veal
Trim off all the skin from a fillet of veal, cut the meat into small pieces, place them in a mortar and pound them. Put half a dozen chicken's livers in a fryingpan with some fat bacon, to fry. Drain the livers, pound them, mix them with the pounded veal, season with mixed spices, pepper and salt, and pass it through a fine hair sieve; then mix with it five tablespoonfuls of rather coarsely chopped cooked ham. Butter some small moulds, line them with a rich puff paste, and fill them with the mixture. Bake for about forty-five minutes in a moderate oven, then remove, and level the contents off to the same height as the moulds. Take the timbales out of the moulds, pour a little thick sauce in them, cover with some lids of puff paste that have been baked by themselves, arrange them on a hot dish covered with a folded napkin, and serve at once.
A pastry-lined forcemeat case, in the style of the classic timbale — most of the work is in getting the veal and liver mixture smooth enough to hold together without turning greasy.
- The poundingA food processor does in thirty seconds what the mortar did in ten minutes, but work the veal in short pulses and keep it cold, or the meat warms and the fat separates. Chill the bowl and blade if the kitchen is warm.
- The sieve is not optionalPassing the pounded veal and liver through a fine sieve (a drum sieve, or a stiff mesh strainer worked with a plastic scraper) is what gives the finished timbale its close, sliceable texture. Skip it and you get something closer to coarse meatloaf.
- "Mixed spices"Probably a blend on the lines of the French quatre epices — pepper, nutmeg, clove and ginger or cinnamon — though the exact mixture is not recorded here. Use it sparingly; a quarter teaspoon or so for a fillet's worth of forcemeat is plenty, and note that the recipe calls for pepper separately in any case.
- Moderate oven350F. The pastry needs to set before the forcemeat swells, so a preheated oven and a preheated baking sheet under the moulds both help.
- Small mouldsDariole moulds, timbale cups or a deep muffin tin all work. Butter them thoroughly and line with the puff paste rolled thin, leaving a little overhang; the recipe has you level the tops off flush with the moulds before turning them out.
- DonenessForty-five minutes is what the original specifies, which suits genuinely small moulds; check with a probe, as veal forcemeat is done at 160F in the centre. Larger moulds will need longer and the pastry may want a foil cap to keep from darkening.
- The liversFry them in the bacon fat only until firm outside and still pink within — a couple of minutes a side. Livers cooked hard turn grainy and bitter once pounded, and they carry the flavour of the whole dish.
- "A little thick sauce"Most likely a reduced brown sauce — demi-glace or a well-reduced veal stock thickened lightly — though the recipe does not say. It goes in warm, just before the baked pastry lids go on, so the cases do not soften.
- YieldThe recipe gives no weight for the fillet, so the yield is a guess: with six livers and the ham, expect roughly eight to ten small timbales, served one or two per person as a first course or luncheon dish.
The timbale takes its name from the French word for a drum or kettle-shaped cup, and by the late nineteenth century it covered any forcemeat baked in a small straight-sided mould, with or without a pastry lining. Dishes like this were the everyday grammar of the grand-hotel kitchen: they used up trimmings of veal, ham and offal, could be assembled in quantity through the afternoon, and arrived at table looking individually composed. The folded napkin under the dish is often said to be function rather than decoration — absorbing steam and keeping the pastry cases from sliding — a service convention Oscar Tschirky would have taken for granted at the Waldorf. The separately baked pastry lid is the same trick used for vol-au-vent: baked apart, it stays crisp instead of steaming over the sauce.