No. 987

Soyer Timbales

Timbales a la Soyer

Prepare a timbale of foundation paste the same as for Lombardy (No. 972). Fill it with a garnishing of game and cream quenelles (No. 733), small mushroom heads, truffles cut into five-sixteenths of an inch pieces, and sweetbreads cut the same; mix with it a lucullus sauce (No. 490); after the timbales are filled, replace the covers, dress them on a folded napkin and serve hot.

← No. 986 Soubise Timbales Hot Side Dishes No. 988 Talleyrand Timbales →

For the Modern Kitchen

Ranhofer writes in shorthand for a professional brigade: this is an assembly instruction that leans on four other numbered recipes. Read those first, because almost all the work is in them.

What a timbale is hereNot the modern custard baked in a mould. This is a lidded pastry case — a drum, hence the name — built from the stiff "foundation paste" of No. 972, shaped in a mould, then filled and capped with its own pastry lid.
The hinge: fill at the last momentThe case is a container, not a crust that cooks with its contents. Everything going in must already be cooked and sauced, and the filling should meet the pastry only minutes before it reaches the table, or the base softens and collapses.
Truffle and sweetbread diceFive-sixteenths of an inch is about 8 mm — a neat dice, deliberately larger than a brunoise so each element stays identifiable under the sauce. Keep the mushroom heads whole and small so the four components read as four things.
SweetbreadsVeal sweetbreads need soaking in several changes of cold water, blanching, pressing under a weight and peeling of membrane before they are braised through. They go into the timbale fully cooked; nothing in this dish will finish them.
Game quenellesNo. 733 is the game and cream quenelle forcemeat this recipe calls for; work from that entry rather than from a general description, as the panada and cream proportions are given there. Pheasant, partridge or hare all work; farmed guinea fowl gives the mildest version. Poach a test quenelle to check the seasoning and the bind before committing the batch.
Lucullus sauceNo. 490 in this book. Follow Ranhofer's number rather than a modern sauce of the same name, as the composition varies between authors. Whatever version you use, it should coat the garnish rather than pool.
The folded napkinA period service convention: the napkin steadies the case on the platter and absorbs any butter that weeps from the pastry. A warmed plate does the same job now.
YieldThe original gives none. Cases baked in dariole moulds serve one each; a larger single timbale would serve several as a hot intermediate course, which is roughly what the book's "Hot Side Dishes" heading covers.

A Little History

The name honours Alexis Soyer, the French-born chef of the Reform Club in London and the best-known cook of the mid-nineteenth century — author of popular cookery books, designer of stoves and portable field kitchens, and organiser of soup kitchens during the Irish famine; he died in 1858. By the time Charles Ranhofer published The Epicurean in 1894 from the kitchens of Delmonico's in New York, attaching a name to a garnish was standard practice, and this section of the book runs through dozens of timbales differing only in filling — Lombardy, Soubise, Talleyrand, Soyer. The sauce name reaches further back: Lucullus was the Roman general whose banquets became a byword for expense, and in nineteenth-century kitchens his name signalled truffles. The dish tells you what a "side dish" meant to a Gilded Age restaurant: an intermediate hot course of game forcemeat, sweetbreads and truffle, served in an edible drum.