No. 2384

Timbale of Fillets of Soles a la Gauloise

Timbale de Filets de Soles a la Gauloise

Fill the timbale paste, prepare and cook a case as explained in No. 2383. After the case is taken from the oven open it on the cut to empty. Glaze the inside with a brush, and dress it on a dish; keep it warm in a heater. Poach the fillets of sole in butter, salt and lemon juice; set them under a light weight, pare and keep them warm likewise. Add to a well-reduced allemande sauce (No. 407) some minced truffles and mushroom heads; fill the timbale with a layer of sole on top of the truffles and mushrooms, then more sole, and continue the operation until the timbale is entirely filled. Garnish around with Milanese macaroni croquettes, and the top with trussed crawfish.

Milanese Macaroni Croquettes are to be made with cooked macaroni cut into half-inch lengths and mingled with allemande sauce (No. 407), adding a salpicon of tongue, truffles and mushrooms; when cold dip in beaten eggs, then in bread-crumbs and fry in hot frying fat.

← No. 2383 Timbale for Epicures Miscellaneous Entrées No. 2385 Timbale of Lobster a la d'Aumale →

For the Modern Kitchen

Ranhofer writes for a brigade with a stockpot already going and a numbered sauce book at hand; the assembly is quick, but three components have to exist before you start. Read it as a plating recipe for a baked pastry case, poached sole and a bound sauce.

The hinge: the sauce must be very thickAllemande (No. 407) is velouté finished with an egg-yolk and cream liaison and lemon; reduced well it should coat a spoon heavily and set slightly on cooling. A loose sauce turns the timbale case soggy from the inside within minutes and the layered structure collapses when cut.
Timbale paste and caseNo. 2383 supplies the paste and the moulded, baked case; this recipe has you cut it open at the top and empty it. Ranhofer gives no mould size or shape here, so scale to the number of fillets you have. "Glaze the inside with a brush" most likely means egg wash or clear meat glaze, brushed on and dried briefly to seal the crumb.
Poaching the soleButter, salt and lemon juice in a covered pan, oven or low heat, only until the fillets turn opaque -- three to five minutes for ordinary sole fillets. Thin flounder or plaice fillets will overcook faster.
"Set them under a light weight" and "pare"Pressing the poached fillets between two trays flattens them so they stack evenly; paring means trimming the ragged edges to a neat shape. Both are cosmetic, but they are what makes the layers sit flush.
Truffles and mushroom headsMinced black truffle can be reduced to a small quantity of preserved truffle or truffle peelings; the flavour, not the volume, is the point. "Mushroom heads" are trimmed button caps, cooked in butter and lemon first so they do not weep into the sauce.
CroquettesSalpicon means everything diced small and even -- cooked tongue, truffle, mushroom. Chill the bound macaroni thoroughly, ideally spread on a tray, before shaping and breading, or the croquettes burst. Ranhofer says only "hot frying fat"; by modern practice that is about 350-375F, fried until deep gold.
Crawfish"Trussed" crawfish are cooked whole with the tail curled under and the claws set forward, a standard garnish of the period. Boiled crawfish or large shell-on shrimp serve the same decorative purpose.
Yield and serviceRanhofer gives no quantities or mould size, so the yield depends entirely on the case you build; it is a single centrepiece served as one course. It has to go to table intact and be cut at the sideboard or at the table; assembled and held, it will not survive reheating.

A Little History

Charles Ranhofer's The Epicurean (1894) records the repertoire of Delmonico's in New York, and this entry is a fair sample of it: a French grande-cuisine construction, numbered and cross-referenced so a cook could chase down the pastry in No. 2383 and the sauce in No. 407 rather than have either repeated. À la gauloise is one of the looser restaurant epithets of the era, Gaul standing in for France generally; classical usage does attach a gauloise garnish (cockscombs and cocks' kidneys) to some dishes, but nothing of that kind appears here, and in this recipe the name seems to signal little more than a dish presented in the grand French manner. The timbale itself is older than the sauce inside it: an edible pastry drum, moulded, baked hollow and filled at the last moment, descended from the raised pies of earlier centuries and kept in use in the nineteenth century partly because it looked impressive on a buffet. Dishes like this one belong to a service style that has largely disappeared, where a single centrepiece was carried out whole, admired, and only then broken into portions.