No. 970

Lagardere Timbales

Timbales a la Lagardere

Make a salpicon of mushrooms and beef palates combined with an allemande sauce (No. 407) reduced with mushroom essence (No. 392), the pieces for the salpicon to be cut into three-sixteenths of inch squares. Have round molds an inch and a half in diameter, having at the bottom an indent a quarter of an inch deep by one inch in diameter, the molds to be one and five-eighths of an inch high, and two inches and one-eighth wide at the opening. Decorate the molds after buttering them when cold with triangles of truffles, three-quarters of an inch long by three-eighths of an inch wide; lay them close together around the opening of the mold, and on the top of each point set a round bit of tongue, three-sixteenths of an inch; garnish the bottom and sides with chicken cream forcemeat (No. 75) and fill the center of the inside with a salpicon ball half an inch in diameter; fill up the mold with more of the forcemeat, finishing it the same as for No. 950. Set on top in the indent a three-quarters of an inch ball of very fine chestnut puree (No. 712) quite thick, bread-crumb and fry in very hot fat, and serve a supreme sauce (No. 547), with essence of mushrooms (No. 392) separately.

← No. 969 Irving Timbales Hot Side Dishes No. 971 La Valliere Timbales →

For the Modern Kitchen

This is a Delmonico's kitchen note rather than a standalone recipe: it assumes four other numbered preparations and a brigade to make them. The critical omission for a modern cook is that the filled molds must be gently poached and chilled to set the forcemeat before they are ever breaded and fried.

The hinge: set before you fryRanhofer's "finishing it the same as for No. 950" points to the usual treatment for these timbales: poaching the filled molds in a bain-marie until the chicken forcemeat is firm, then chilling them thoroughly, unmolding, breading and frying. No. 950 is not given here, but raw forcemeat dropped into fat would burst the crust and leach out.
Beef palatesThe roof of a steer's mouth, a standard nineteenth-century garnish meat, sold gelatinous and bland. Almost no retail butcher carries it now; it required scalding, peeling of the outer skin, then two to three hours of simmering before it could be diced. Braised veal sweetbread or firm poached chicken breast gives the same neutral, tender dice.
Allemande and supreme saucesAllemande (No. 407) is a velouté finished with an egg-yolk and cream liaison, thickened here by reduction with mushroom essence so the salpicon binds rather than runs. Supreme (No. 547) is chicken velouté enriched with cream. Neither may boil after the enrichment goes in.
Mushroom essenceNo. 392 is a concentrated mushroom cooking liquor, strained and reduced hard. A modern equivalent is the strained cooking liquid from a pound of mushrooms reduced to a few spoonfuls; it is a seasoning, not a sauce.
The moldsThe dimensions describe small timbale or dariole molds, roughly 1 1/2 to 2 inches across and just over an inch and a half deep, with a shallow depression in the base that becomes a socket for the chestnut ball once the timbale is turned out. Ordinary straight-sided dariole molds work; you lose only the seat for the garnish.
Decorating cold"After buttering them when cold" matters: the truffle triangles and tongue rounds only stay where you place them if the butter is firm. Butter the molds and refrigerate them, then set the decoration, then chill again before adding forcemeat.
The measurements are exact for a reasonThree-sixteenths of an inch is about 5 mm — the salpicon must be fine enough to hold together as a half-inch ball at the center. Cut it coarser and the core collapses when the timbale is unmolded.
Frying"Very hot fat" for a breaded item already poached through means fat hot enough to color the crumb fast, roughly 375F in modern terms, deep enough to float the timbales, and only long enough to color -- a minute or two. Longer and the forcemeat swells and splits.

A Little History

The Epicurean (1894) is Charles Ranhofer's record of his years running the kitchen at Delmonico's in New York, and the timbale section is where that kitchen's ambitions are clearest: a run of numbered variations, each distinguished less by flavor than by the geometry of its garnish and the sauce sent up beside it. The name follows the house habit of borrowing from the stage and the popular novel — Henri de Lagardère is the swordsman hero of Paul Féval's Le Bossu (1857), and the attribution is likely the usual sort of compliment rather than any claim about origin. The dish itself is pure French garde-manger practice of the period: a salpicon, meaning meat and mushrooms diced small and bound in a thick sauce, hidden inside a poached mousseline of chicken, then breaded and fried so that the truffle-and-tongue pattern set in the butter emerges intact on the outside. Beef palates in the filling are the giveaway of a professional larder that wasted nothing and prized texture over assertiveness; they disappeared from American cooking along with the kind of kitchen that had the labor to clean them.