No. 2381

Timbale a la Nantaise

Line a timbale mold the same as for No. 2383, cook it lightly, and when removed from the oven, unmold, open on the cut end, empty it of its contents, and keep warm. Prepare a garnishing composed of a few dozen poached oysters or else crawfish tails or red shrimps (either of them shelled), or slices of cooked lobster-tail meat, four ounces of peeled truffles previously cooked in Madeira wine, and a few dozen small salmon quenelles rolled on a floured table and poached. Range these garnishings in a sautoir and keep them well covered. Put on to reduce a few gills of good bechamel (No. 409), stir slowly into it the oyster broth, also a few spoonfuls of good courtbouillon (No. 38) reduced to a half-glaze; finish the sauce with a pinch of cayenne pepper and lobster butter (No. 580) and a handful of grated parmesan. Cover the garnishings with this sauce, set them in layers in the timbale, alternating with the remainder of the sauce; close the top with the removed lid and serve at once.

← No. 2380 Veal Tart or Pie a la Dickinson Miscellaneous Entrées No. 2382 Timbale of Chicken, Parisian Style-Large →

For the Modern Kitchen

An assembly dish rather than a cooked one: a blind-baked pastry case, a shellfish garnish, and a fortified béchamel, brought together at the last possible moment. Ranhofer assumes you have already made four other numbered recipes, so read it as a plan of work rather than a list of steps.

Do the parts in the right orderThe sauce and garnish should be finished and hot before the case comes out of the oven. Once assembled, a timbale sits for minutes, not longer, before the pastry begins to soften from the inside.
The mold and its liningA timbale mold is a round mold with slightly flared sides, baked lined with a stiff unsweetened paste and a lid cut to fit; the cross-reference to No. 2383 supplies that lining. It is baked with something inside to hold its shape — Ranhofer's "empty it of its contents" — probably a dry filling such as rice or flour, though the recipe does not say what; keep it warm and dry while you finish the filling.
Gills and spoonfulsA gill is half a cup, so "a few gills of bechamel" is roughly 1 to 1 1/2 cups before reduction. The spoonfuls of court-bouillon glaze are seasoning, not volume; add them to taste.
SautoirA shallow, straight-sided sauté pan. Here it is only a warm holding vessel, covered, so the garnish does not dry or continue to cook.
Oysters need two minutesPoach them just until the edges ruffle, then lift them out and reserve the liquor for the sauce. Anything approaching a full simmer turns them tough, and they will get a second warming in the finished timbale.
QuenellesSalmon quenelles are a fine pounded fish forcemeat, bound with egg and enriched with cream or butter (Ranhofer's fish forcemeats often use a panada), shaped small — here rolled on a floured table — and poached in barely trembling water until just firm. Poach one as a test before committing the batch.
Truffles in MadeiraFour ounces of peeled truffle is a nineteenth-century restaurant quantity and now a serious expense. A tablespoon of good truffle, or simply the Madeira reduction, carries the intention; cooked mushrooms are a different dish but an honest one.
Lobster butter and cheeseLobster butter (shells pounded with butter, melted and strained) is what gives the sauce its colour and depth — without it the parmesan and cayenne dominate. Add the cheese off the heat so the sauce does not string.
YieldThe recipe gives no yield, but a case holding a few dozen oysters and a few dozen quenelles would suit roughly eight to ten as one course in a long menu, or four to six as a modern main.

A Little History

"A la Nantaise" points to Nantes, on the Loire estuary, and in French kitchen usage the name attaches to a range of garnishes associated with the city and its region — shellfish and freshwater crayfish, salmon coming up the river, vegetable garnishes, the region's duck, and butter sauces enriched with wine. This is Charles Ranhofer's version, from The Epicurean (1894), the enormous record of his cooking at Delmonico's in New York, where a lined and lidded pastry timbale was standard grand-service work: it let a kitchen present a delicate ragout at table as a sealed architectural object. The recipe's habit of pointing to other numbers — béchamel, court-bouillon, lobster butter, the pastry lining — is not laziness but the logic of a brigade, where each of those things was somebody's standing job and existed already at the time of the order.