No. 972

Lombardy Timbales

Timbales a la Lombarde

Line buttered timbale molds (No. 2, Fig. 137) with thin timbale paste (No. 150), garnish the sides with buttered paper, and fill the center with rice; cover over with a small piece of buttered paper, moisten lightly the inside border of the timbales, and cover with a layer of paste; fasten the two together, pinch the border with a channeled pastry tong, egg over the top and place on it three small layers of thin puff paste, the lowest one being an inch and a half in diameter, the second, one and a quarter, and the last or top one, one inch, all three being cut out with a channeled pastry cutter. Cook the timbales in a moderate oven, remove the lids, empty out the rice and paper, unmold and egg over the outside, then set them in a quick oven; garnish the insides with pieces of chestnuts, sweetbreads and truffles cut into quarter inch squares, and mixed with an allemande sauce (No. 407); replace the covers and serve on a Lombard sauce (No. 489).

← No. 971 La Valliere Timbales Hot Side Dishes No. 973 Marly Timbales →

For the Modern Kitchen

Ranhofer is describing a pastry case baked blind in a mold, unmolded, filled with a bound ragout and capped with its own decorated lid. Nothing here is difficult, but the recipe assumes you already have four other numbered preparations on hand.

The hinge: the rice is not an ingredientThe rice and the buttered paper are blind-baking weights, poured out and discarded once the case is set. Line the mold with paper first or you will be picking grains out of the pastry.
Timbale moldsRanhofer's No. 2 mold is a small straight-sided or slightly tapered cylinder of the dariole type; the recipe gives no dimensions, though the 1 1/2-inch bottom pastry round implies a lid at least that wide. Butter generously and chill the lined mold before filling.
Timbale pasteHis No. 150 is a stiff paste made to hold a shape and stand up when unmolded rather than to eat tenderly. A firm pâte à foncer behaves the same way; ordinary flaky pie dough will slump.
Oven temperatures'Moderate' is conventionally read as around 350F for the initial baking, until the case is set and pale gold. The 'quick oven' after egg-washing the unmolded shell is nearer 425-450F, and only long enough to gild the outside, a few minutes.
Allemande sauceNo. 407 is a velouté finished with an egg-yolk liaison. Keep it short of a hard boil once the yolks are in, and make it thick, since it is a binder here rather than a pouring sauce.
Lombard sauceNo. 489 has to be consulted for its composition; what this page establishes is only that the finished timbales are served sitting on a pool of it rather than napped with it.
SweetbreadsVeal sweetbreads need soaking in several changes of cold water, blanching, pressing under a weight, and peeling before they are cut into the quarter-inch dice called for. Buy them fresh and use them within a day.
Chestnuts and trufflesChestnuts means cooked and peeled, not raw; vacuum-packed whole chestnuts work and save an hour. Fresh black truffle is the intent, but a small quantity of preserved truffle, added off the heat, is the practical substitute.
YieldThe original gives none. Figure one timbale per person as a hot side dish within a longer menu, and expect the trimmings from the tiered pastry lids to use up more dough than you think.

A Little History

The Epicurean (1894) is Charles Ranhofer's record of some thirty years as chef at Delmonico's in New York, and it is organized less as a cookbook than as a professional reference: nearly every recipe is a set of cross-references to other numbered preparations, on the assumption that a brigade already has velouté, puff paste and truffles at hand. Timbales of this kind — a baked pastry drum filled at the last moment with a creamy salpicon — were a fixture of the nineteenth-century service à la russe menu, where a hot side dish might arrive somewhere between the fish and the roast and was expected to look architectural. The tag à la Lombarde points to Lombardy, but here the rice is only ballast and the regional claim rests on Ranhofer's own Lombard sauce. The three graduated puff-paste rounds stacked on the lid do nothing for flavor at all; they are there because a dish leaving a Delmonico's kitchen was expected to declare itself.