No. 964

Duchess Timbales

Timbales a la Duchesse

Prepare a salpicon of truffles, foies-gras, artichoke bottoms, and rings of olives, made by removing the stones with a tin tube, and cutting them in slices across; mix with a well reduced financiere sauce (No. 464), and let get cold. Decorate the bottom of the mold (No. 2, Fig. 137) with a ring of truffle, and fill in the empty space of this with some chopped up pistachios; lay at equal distances at lower edge of the side of the mold, ten small round pieces of beef tongue, each one three-sixteenths of an inch in circumference; and from these set bands of truffle perpendicularly reaching to the top of the mold, each one being three-sixteenths of an inch in width; garnish the bottom and sides with a layer of quenelle chicken forcemeat (No. 89), and place in the center a half inch diameter ball of the salpicon; cover with more forcemeat, then poach and finish the same as for No. 959. Serve a Madeira sauce (No. 492) separately.

← No. 963 Timbales a la Chevaliere Hot Side Dishes No. 965 Timbales a la Dumas →

For the Modern Kitchen

This is one entry in a chain of cross-references, and it assumes you have Ranhofer's forcemeat, financière and Madeira sauce recipes at hand. What follows is what a modern cook needs to read it as a working set of instructions.

The hinge: poach, never boilChicken quenelle forcemeat sets by coagulation of protein and egg, and it breaks if the water goes above a bare shiver. Stand the filled molds in a bain-marie of water held around 170-180F, cover with buttered paper, and hold there until the centers are just firm; a rolling boil will make the forcemeat rise, then collapse and weep.
SalpiconA salpicon is simply a fine, even dice of cooked garnish bound with a reduced sauce. Cut the truffle, foie gras and artichoke bottoms to a uniform 1/8-inch, and chill the bound mixture solid so it can be rolled into the half-inch balls the recipe asks for.
The moldThe recipe calls for a specific mold, No. 2 in Ranhofer's Fig. 137. A small timbale or dariole mold is the practical stand-in. Butter it well and chill it before laying in the truffle and tongue decoration, or the pieces will slide as you line the walls with forcemeat.
"Three-sixteenths of an inch in circumference"This is almost certainly a slip for diameter; a circumference of 3/16 inch would give tongue rounds smaller than a pinhead. Read it as tongue discs and truffle bands 3/16 inch across, which matches the scale of the mold.
Financiere sauceNo. 464 is Ranhofer's financiere, a rich brown sauce of the Madeira-and-truffle family. Reduce it hard, as the recipe insists: a loose sauce will not hold the salpicon in a ball, and moisture leaching into the forcemeat during poaching will split it.
Foies-grasHere this most likely means prepared foie gras, terrine or parfait, cut into dice rather than raw liver; raw lobe would render fat into the salpicon and loosen the bind. A good mousse or pate de foie gras is the practical substitute.
Pitting the olivesThe "tin tube" is a small cutter; a cherry pitter or a 1/4-inch plain piping tip does the same work. Slicing the pitted olive crosswise gives the rings the decoration depends on.
Unmolding and yieldUnmolding -- Rest the poached timbales two or three minutes before turning out, so they firm and release cleanly. The Madeira sauce (No. 492) is passed separately rather than poured over the decoration, as the recipe directs.

A Little History

The Epicurean (1894) is Charles Ranhofer's record of some thirty years as chef of Delmonico's in New York, and this dish belongs to the most self-consciously grand part of it: the hot side dishes that displayed a kitchen's brigade rather than fed a family. The name points to the standard nineteenth-century French garnish vocabulary, in which a la duchesse usually signals duchess potatoes; no potato appears in this preparation, and the label carries no fixed formula here. What is fixed is the technique: a lined mold, a hidden salpicon core, and a decoration of truffle, tongue and pistachio built up piece by piece inside the mold so that it appears, reversed and intact, only when the timbale is turned out. That kind of labor, invisible until the moment of service, is precisely the argument a restaurant like Delmonico's was making about itself, and the recipe's dense web of cross-references to numbered sauces and forcemeats shows the book was written for cooks working in exactly such a kitchen rather than for a household.