No. 960

Timbales a la Beaumarchais

Make a salpicon with mushrooms and foies-gras cut in three-sixteenths of an inch squares; mix them in an espagnole sauce (No. 414), reduced with game essence (No. 389) and let get cold. Butter and decorate the molds (No. 2, Fig. 137) with a large truffle ring at the bottom, and a small piece of truffle in the center of this; ornament the sides with eight perpendicular thin slices of truffles each three-sixteenths of an inch wide, laid at equal distances apart around the mold; cover the bottom and sides with a game quenelle forcemeat (No. 91); in the middle place a half inch in diameter ball of the salpicon, lay over more forcemeat, and poach the timbales as in No. 152. Serve separately a half-glaze sauce (No. 413), with essence of game (No. 389) and Rhine wine added.

← No. 959 Timbales, Remarks on Hot Side Dishes No. 961 Timbales a la Benton →

For the Modern Kitchen

This is a Delmonico's kitchen note rather than a standalone recipe: five of its steps are cross-references to other numbered entries in The Epicurean. What follows is what those numbers stand for and where the dish will fail if rushed.

The hinge: poach, never boilNo. 152 is Ranhofer's poaching instruction for timbales; keep the water at a bare tremble rather than a simmer. A quenelle forcemeat that boils swells, weeps its cream and butter, and collapses when unmolded; the timbales are done when firm to the fingertip at the center, which for small molds of two to three ounces will take something in the region of twenty minutes.
Butter the molds coldThe truffle decoration holds far more reliably if the mold is chilled, brushed with soft butter, chilled again, and the truffle slices pressed onto set butter. A thin film of clarified butter, or a smear of cold aspic, is the usual modern approach; then chill the lined mold again before the forcemeat goes in.
Three-sixteenths of an inchRanhofer's habitual dice, about 5 mm. It matters here because the salpicon has to compress into a half-inch ball at the center without bursting the forcemeat lining, so keep the cut small and even.
SalpiconSimply a fine dice of cooked ingredients bound in a sauce, cooked down thick and chilled until it can be rolled. It must be cold and stiff, near the consistency of thick pate, or it will thin out inside the timbale and leak.
The sauce numbersNo. 414 espagnole is the old brown mother sauce, No. 413 the half-glaze — demi-glace — made by reducing it. A good reduced veal or game stock thickened only by reduction does the same job today. No. 389 game essence is a strongly reduced game stock; the trimmings and bones of any dark game bird will give it.
Game quenelle forcemeatNo. 91 is Ranhofer's game quenelle forcemeat, of the usual kind: pounded raw game flesh worked with a panada and cream, then sieved smooth. A food processor and a fine drum sieve replace the mortar, but keep everything ice cold and test-poach a teaspoon of the mixture before lining the molds -- that spoonful tells you whether it is over- or under-seasoned and whether it will hold.
Foies-grasHere it means whole cooked foie gras cut in dice, not a mousse or a pate spread. Duck foie gras, or a good chicken-liver parfait cut cold, will read correctly against the truffle.
Rhine wineA German white of the period, generally Riesling; a dry Riesling is the nearest modern stand-in, though period Rhine wines were not always dry. Add it at the end and off the heat; boiling the finished half-glaze after the wine goes in flattens the point of adding it.
YieldThe original gives none. Figure one timbale of two to three ounces per person as a hot side dish, and count on about a pound of forcemeat and half a pound of salpicon for eight.

A Little History

The Epicurean (1894) is Charles Ranhofer's record of thirty-odd years as chef at Delmonico's in New York, and this entry shows the house system at work: a base preparation, a numbered sauce, a numbered forcemeat, and a garnish name that fixes the whole arrangement in the kitchen's shorthand. Naming dishes after literary and political figures was standard nineteenth-century French practice, and Pierre-Augustin Caron de Beaumarchais, author of Le Barbier de Seville and Le Mariage de Figaro, was a name that carried in a Gilded Age dining room where the menus were written in French. The dish itself belongs to the vanished category of the hot side dish, or entree volante: a small, laborious, individually molded item served between heavier courses, in which the visible work — eight truffle slices laid at equal distances inside a mold no one will see intact — was the point. Attributions of this kind are conventional rather than documented, and there is no suggestion the writer had anything to do with the combination of truffle, foie gras and game essence.