Timbales for Gourmets

Ranhofer writes for a brigade that already knows the house sauces, so this entry is mostly assembly and decoration; the cooking is a gentle water-bath poach. Read it as three separate jobs — the garnish, the forcemeat, the poach — and do the fiddly truffle work first while everything is cold.

• The hinge: keep everything cold and poach gentlyA chicken cream forcemeat is an emulsion of pounded breast, egg white and cream; if it warms while you are lining the molds it breaks and weeps in the water bath. Chill the salpicon solid, work over ice, and poach at a bare tremble in a bain-marie, water never boiling, until the forcemeat is just set through. Ranhofer gives no temperature or timing here; a poultry forcemeat should be cooked through, and the time will depend on the size of the mold.
• The cross-referencesNo. 492 is a reduced Madeira sauce and No. 75 the chicken cream forcemeat, both named as such in the text; No. 959 is the earlier timbale recipe whose finishing this one tells you to copy, and No. 472 the gourmet sauce. Nothing here works without them; look each one up before starting.
• SalpiconSimply a dice of one or more cooked items bound with a reduced sauce. Here the bind should be stiff enough at refrigerator temperature to roll into half-inch balls that hold their shape as the forcemeat goes around them.
• Ducks' liversThe text says only 'ducks' livers' and does not specify fattened liver. Ordinary duck liver from a butcher works, briefly seared and cooled before dicing; if you use foie gras it will render badly should the salpicon warm. Either way the dice is one-eighth inch, which is smaller than instinct suggests.
• TrufflesThe decoration alone calls for a lot of black truffle sliced paper-thin. Tinned or jarred whole winter truffle slices cut to a uniform eighth-inch band are the practical route; the bands adhere to a buttered, well-chilled mold, and a wipe of half-set aspic helps them stay put while the forcemeat goes in.
• The moldsFig. 137 No. 2 is one of the small plain timbale molds illustrated in the book; check the figure rather than a stated size, and a dariole mold of similar capacity substitutes. Butter them, then chill hard before laying in the truffle.
• Beef tongueCooked, cured red tongue — the pink colour is the point of the panel decoration. Cut ovals with the small end of a piping tip. Unsmoked cured tongue from a deli counter substitutes cleanly.
• Yield and serviceFigure one timbale per person as a hot side or small entrée, and count on losing one or two to failed unmolding. Rest the poached molds five minutes before turning out, and pass the gourmet sauce separately as written rather than napping the timbales, which would hide the decoration you spent an hour on.