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Tongue, Sweetbread, Calf's
HEAD, LIVER, SUCKING PIG, &c.
No. 95. Timballo alla Romana Ingredients : Cold fowl, game, or sweetbread, butter, lard, flour, Parmesan, truffles, macaroni, onions, cream.
Make a light paste of two ounces of butter, two of lard, and half a pound of flour, and put it in the larder for two hours. In the meantime boil a little macaroni and let it get cold, then line a plain mould with the paste, and fill it with bits of cut-up fowl, or game, or sweetbread, bits of truffle cut in small dice, grated Parmesan, and a little chopped onion.
Put these ingredients in alternately, and after each layer add enough cream to moisten.
Fill the mould quite full, then roll out a thin paste for the top and press it well together at the edges to keep the cream from boiling out. Bake it in a moderate oven for an hour and a half, turn it out of the mould, and serve with a rich brown sauce. Decorate the top with bits of red tongue and truffles cut into shapes or with a little chopped pistacchio nut.
A pastry-lined mould filled with cooked meats, macaroni and cream — the sort of dish written for a cook who already knew the method and needed only the proportions. Two points in the original need filling in before you start.
- The macaroni goes missingYou are told to boil a little macaroni and let it cool, but the filling instructions never mention it again. Layer it in with the meat and cheese; roughly 4 oz dry macaroni, boiled short of soft since it will bake for another 90 minutes.
- Everything in the filling is already cookedCold fowl, game or sweetbread means leftovers or meat poached in advance. Sweetbreads in particular should be soaked, blanched, trimmed of membrane and cooled before they go anywhere near the mould; the recipe assumes them cooked, and raw sweetbread sealed in pastry will not have the firm texture the dish wants.
- The pasteTwo ounces butter, two of lard and half a pound of flour is a short crust at about half fat to flour, and it needs water — a few tablespoons of ice water, added until it just coheres. "Put it in the larder for two hours" means rest it somewhere cold; a larder was a cool store-room, so the fridge is the modern stand-in. Two hours is generous, but the resting matters for a mould this deep.
- Moderate oven350F / 175C. An hour and a half at that heat is right for a filled mould of this size, but cover the top with foil if the pastry colours early.
- Sealing is the hingeThe edges must be genuinely pinched shut. Cream boiling out is not just untidy — it leaves the filling dry and the pastry sodden at the base. Set the mould on a tray.
- Cream, sparingly"Enough to moisten" is exactly that, a spoonful or two per layer. A wet filling steams the pastry from inside and the timballo collapses when turned out.
- TrufflesFresh black truffle is a luxury item; a small jar of preserved truffle peelings, or finely chopped sauteed mushrooms with a few drops of truffle oil, will carry the same purpose here.
- Red tonguePressed, cured ox tongue, sold by weight at a deli counter. It is used purely as decoration, cut into rounds or diamonds, and can be left out without affecting the dish.
- YieldA 1.5-quart mould serves six to eight as a substantial course. Let it stand ten minutes before unmoulding so the filling settles.
Timballo takes its name from the drum-shaped mould it is baked in — the Italian word, like the French timbale, means kettledrum, and is generally traced back through Arabic at-tabl. Dishes of this family, pasta and meat sealed in a pastry case and turned out whole, were the grand centrepieces of Italian eighteenth- and nineteenth-century cooking, the same tradition that produced the operatic timpano of Naples and Sicily. The Cook's Decameron (1901) was written to introduce Italian cooking to English households through a Boccaccio-style frame of ten days' conversation and menus, and this recipe shows the book's practical bent: it is a way of using up cold fowl or game, dressed up with truffle, Parmesan and a brown sauce so that leftovers arrive at table looking deliberate.