No. 989

Venetian Timbales

Timbales a la Venitienne

Make a salpicon of ducks' livers cut up into one-eighth of an inch pieces, cut the same of some truffles, mushrooms, and red beef tongue, and mix all with a well reduced allemande sauce (No. 407). Butter some timbale molds (No. 2, Fig. 137), lay at the bottom a round slice of truffle, and from the center of it cut out with a vegetable cutter, a piece half an inch in diameter, and place in its stead a round piece of tongue; dust over the sides with very finely chopped pistachios shaken through a sieve, and fill up the molds with chicken cream forcemeat (No. 75), laying a ball of the salpicon in the middle; finish as in No. 959. Serve separately a bechamel sauce (No. 409), reduced with mushroom liquor and some chopped parsley added.

← No. 988 Talleyrand Timbales Hot Side Dishes No. 990 Timbales with Red Beef Tongue →

For the Modern Kitchen

This is a cross-referenced recipe from a professional kitchen: three of its five components live elsewhere in the book. Read it as an assembly diagram rather than a standalone formula, and settle the forcemeat before anything else.

The hinge: the forcemeatEverything depends on the chicken cream forcemeat (a pounded chicken mousseline enriched with cream) being cold and correctly bound. If the cream is added too fast or the mixture warms, it can break, and the timbales weep and collapse when unmolded. Keep the bowl on ice and test-poach a teaspoonful before filling the molds.
Timbale moldsRanhofer's timbale molds are small straight-sided or slightly tapered metal darioles; the book does not state a capacity here. Buttered ramekins or small metal pudding molds of similar shape work; a shallow muffin tin is a poor substitute, since the shape prevents clean unmolding.
"Finish as in No. 959"That means covering the molds and poaching them in a bain-marie in a slow oven until just set; no temperature or timing is given in the text. The water must never simmer; boiling water makes the mousseline grainy and porous.
Allemande sauceA velouté (white stock thickened with white roux) finished with an egg-yolk and cream liaison and lemon. It is used here only as a binder for the salpicon and must be reduced until it coats a spoon heavily, or the diced filling will bleed into the pale forcemeat.
SalpiconSimply a mixture of small, even dice bound in sauce.
Ducks' liversOrdinary duck livers, not foie gras. Trim the green-tinged bile spots, then sauté briefly in butter and cool before dicing; raw liver will bleed color through the forcemeat. Chicken livers are a fair stand-in.
Truffle and pistachioThe truffle disc with a tongue center and the sieved pistachio dust are the whole point of the dish visually, since they appear on the outside of the turned-out timbale. Black truffle is intended, fresh or preserved; jarred truffle slices give the pattern without much perfume. Use unsalted, unroasted, skinned pistachios.
Yield and serviceThe recipe gives no quantities or yield. They must be unmolded and sauced immediately; the recipe directs that the bechamel, reduced with mushroom liquor and finished with chopped parsley, be served separately.

A Little History

Charles Ranhofer published The Epicurean in 1894 after some thirty years as chef at Delmonico's in New York, and this entry shows the book's method plainly: a dish is not so much a recipe as a set of coordinates pointing to numbered sauces and forcemeats already established earlier in the volume. Timbales -- named, by the standard dictionary derivation, from the Arabic-derived tabl, a drum, by way of the French word for a drum-shaped cup -- were a staple of the hot side dishes, prized precisely because the mold let a kitchen build a pattern of truffle and tongue into the surface of something otherwise plain.