No. 977

Neapolitan Timbales

Timbales Napolitaine

The salpicon is composed of tongue, truffles and mushrooms, cut in three-sixteenth of an inch squares and combined with espagnole sauce (No. 414), meat glaze (No. 402) and tomato sauce (No. 549); let cool, cut some macaroni into pieces a sixteenth of an inch long, fill the empty places in each macaroni half of them with a round piece of truffle to fit it exactly, and the other half with beef tongue instead of truffles. Butter the timbale molds (No. 2, Fig. 137), lay a round piece of truffle on the bottom, and around it set the bits of macaroni, one row filled with tongue, and over this, one filled with truffles; one laid symmetrically above the other until the mold is filled. Garnish the bottom and sides with chicken quenelle forcemeat (No. 89), and a half inch ball of the salpicon in the center, fill up with more forcemeat and finish them exactly the same as for No. 959. Serve a separate sauce-boat of Neapolitan sauce (No. 507).

← No. 976 Mosaic Timbales Hot Side Dishes No. 978 Palermitaine Timbales →

For the Modern Kitchen

This is a decorated timbale from the era when a side dish was expected to be an object of construction. The eating is simple — a chicken forcemeat baked around a diced garnish — but nearly all the labour is in the mosaic lining, and the recipe leans on four other numbered preparations to get there.

The hinge is temperature, not timeQuenelle forcemeat is an emulsion of pounded chicken, egg and cream; it must be poached gently in a bain-marie, never boiled or baked dry, or it curdles and weeps. Ranhofer gives no temperature or time here, referring instead to No. 959, so set the filled molds in a pan of hot water in a moderate oven and cook until just firm to the touch.
What the cross-references areEspagnole (No. 414) is the classic brown sauce; meat glaze (No. 402) is stock reduced to a syrupy glace de viande; No. 89 is the chicken quenelle forcemeat that forms the body of the timbale. Any competent modern versions of these will serve. Neapolitan sauce (No. 507) is a brown sauce in the classical repertoire rather than an Italian pasta sauce.
SalpiconSimply a mixture of ingredients cut into small, even dice and bound with sauce. Ranhofer's three-sixteenths of an inch is about 5 mm. Cut it cold and bind it sparingly — too much sauce and the ball will not hold in the center of the forcemeat.
The macaroni mosaicThe macaroni here is dried tubular pasta, cooked and cut into rings about 1.5 mm long, each plugged with a disc of truffle or tongue so that the cut face reads as a two-colour tile. Cook the macaroni until fully tender and cool it before slicing; underdone pasta will still be firm after the timbale is poached and will chew against the forcemeat.
Timbale moldsSmall straight-sided or slightly tapered metal dariole molds; the recipe points to its own illustration (No. 2, Fig. 137) rather than giving a size. Butter them well and chill the butter before laying in the mosaic, or the pieces will slide when the forcemeat goes in.
TongueBeef tongue is used cooked, peeled and pressed — the pink cured kind, which is why it reads as a colour against the black truffle. It is still sold by butchers and in delis, though it must be ordered ahead in most places.
Truffles, honestlyRanhofer means black winter truffle, used lavishly and cheaply by the standards of a Gilded Age restaurant kitchen. At current prices the mosaic alone is an expensive proposition; black olive paste rounds or blanched black trumpet mushrooms give the colour, though not the perfume.
YieldThe original gives none. Reckon one mold per person as a side dish, and count on the forcemeat expanding slightly, so fill the molds a little short of the rim.

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 recipe shows the house style at its most literal: a dish built like marquetry, in a numbered system where nearly every component points to another page. The word timbale comes from the French for a kettledrum, itself generally traced to the Arabic tabl, and refers first to the drum-shaped mold and only afterwards to what is cooked in it. The Neapolitan label is doing the same work as the mosaic — for Naples in nineteenth-century French kitchens, so a garnish of pasta and a tomato-based sauce were enough to earn a dish the name, whatever else went into it. Timbales of this kind belonged to the hot side-dish course of a long service menu, where a small, showy, individually molded thing was expected between heavier courses, and where a brigade large enough to plug rings of macaroni with truffle discs was simply assumed.