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Chestnut Timbales
Slit on one side twenty-five good-sized, sound Italian chestnuts, place on tin and roast in oven for twenty minutes. Remove, shell and place them in small saucepan with enough milk to just cover, add three saltspoons salt, cover pan, let boil until nearly dry, then place in a mortar and pound to a fine pulp. Remove, press through sieve into a saucepan, add two egg yolks, two saltspoons salt, a saltspoon each cayenne and grated nutmeg, and briskly stir while heating on fire for five minutes. Lightly butter six individual pudding moulds, fill up with the chestnuts, place on a tin, pour hot water in up to half the height of moulds, set in oven for twenty minutes, remove, unmould and use as directed.
A savoury chestnut custard baked in a water bath, intended as a garnish for game or roast poultry rather than a dish on its own. The recipe assumes you know how to handle chestnuts; that is the part worth spelling out.
- Peel while hotThis is the hinge. Chestnuts shed both the shell and the bitter inner pellicle only while they are still hot from the oven; once cool the skin welds to the nut. Roast them, tip them into a towel, and peel a few at a time, leaving the rest covered.
- Oven temperaturesThe recipe gives none. Roasting the slit chestnuts in a hot oven, around 400F, suits the twenty minutes given; for the moulds in their water bath a moderate oven, roughly 325-350F, is safer, since much hotter curdles the egg yolks and leaves the timbales weeping.
- SaltspoonsA saltspoon is a quarter teaspoon. The recipe therefore calls for about 3/4 teaspoon of salt in the milk and a further 1/2 teaspoon in the purée, plus 1/4 teaspoon each cayenne and nutmeg. That is assertive seasoning by modern habit, and the cayenne especially can be halved.
- QuantityTwenty-five good-sized chestnuts will run somewhere between a pound and a pound and a half in the shell, yielding perhaps 12-16 oz of peeled nut. Vacuum-packed peeled chestnuts work and skip the peeling entirely; simmer them in the milk as directed.
- Mortar and sieveA food processor does the pounding in seconds, but do not skip the sieve afterwards. Chestnut keeps a fibrous grain that no blade fully breaks down, and the sieve is what makes the texture read as custard rather than stuffing.
- Cook the milk down, not away"Until nearly dry" means the milk has been absorbed and the pan is thick and sputtering, not scorched. Chestnut starch catches quickly on the bottom, so stir the last few minutes.
- The five minutes on the fireStirring the yolks into the hot purée over heat sets the base lightly. Keep it well below a simmer and moving constantly, or the yolks scramble before the moulds ever reach the oven.
- Water bath and mouldingButter the moulds thoroughly and use small ramekins or dariole moulds of about 2 to 3 oz; the purée will not fill six larger ones. The recipe fills the tin before it goes in the oven, but adding the hot water once the tin is on the shelf is easier and safer. Keep the water at a bare tremble. The timbales are done when set at the centre with no liquid movement; rest them five minutes before turning out.
- Yield and serviceSix small moulds, enough for six as a garnish alongside venison, hare, turkey or roast goose. As a course on its own it serves three, with a brown sauce or a spoonful of pan gravy.
A timbale takes its name from the French timbale, a drum — a derivation that runs by way of the metal drinking cup of the same name — and the word came to attach to the small straight-sided mould the dish is baked in; by the late nineteenth century it covered any savoury purée or forcemeat set with egg and turned out of such a mould. Chestnut versions belong to the game season, when chestnuts and wildfowl arrive together in European markets, and the pairing of the two is old and thoroughly conventional in French and Italian cooking, where chestnuts are treated as a starchy vegetable rather than a dessert nut. The instruction to "use as directed" is a sign of how this book works: the timbales are a component, cross-referenced from the roast and game recipes that call for them. The International Cook Book came out of the professional restaurant tradition — its author, Alexander Filippini, had long service at Delmonico's in New York — which explains both the specification of Italian chestnuts and the assumption that a mortar and a fine sieve are simply on hand.