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Timbales of Lobster
Plunge two two-pound live lobsters in a gallon boiling water with a tablespoon salt, boil for twenty minutes. Take up and crack the shells of the claws and tail. Pick out all the meat and cut into half-inch pieces, place the meat on a plate with ten sliced canned mushrooms, and one small truffle cut in small squares, and keep in a cool place until required. Cut the heads from the lobsters, place the bodies and shells in a saucepan with a sliced onion, two branches parsley, a branch chervil, moisten with a gill white wine, pint broth, season with a light teaspoon salt, cover the pan, and let boil for thirty-five minutes. Mix in a sauteuse one ounce butter with one and a half ounces flour, strain the broth into the pan, then mix well and let boil on the open fire for ten minutes, occasionally mixing meanwhile. Dilute two egg yolks in a bowl with a gill cream, two tablespoons sherry and the juice of a quarter of a lemon, and add to the sauce; sharply mix for one minute; add the lobster, mushrooms and truffles, season with a saltspoon cayenne pepper and a saltspoon grated nutmeg and constantly stir on the fire for five minutes while cooking. Remove, transfer to a bowl and keep in a cool place till required. Remove the skin and bones from a half pound of fresh salmon, place in a mortar and pound to a pulp, then add a bread panade, two egg yolks, half teaspoon salt, a saltspoon cayenne and half a saltspoon grated nutmeg. Thoroughly pound again for three minutes, then press all the force through a sieve into a bowl. Butter a large plain pudding mould, set on the ice, then line the bottom and sides with half of the force. Drop the prepared lobster in the center, cover with the rest of the force, lay a buttered paper on top, place the mould in a saucepan, pour hot water up to half the height of mould, then set in a slack oven for forty minutes. Remove, lift up the paper, unmould on a large dish, pour a paprika cream sauce over the timbales and serve.
A full Delmonico-style construction: lobster in a rich velouté sealed inside a salmon mousseline and baked in a water bath. Nothing here is difficult, but the sequence matters and two of the original timings are longer than they should be.
- The hinge: the egg liaisonOnce the two yolks, cream, sherry and lemon go into the sauce, it must not boil. The five minutes of "constantly stir on the fire" means low heat and steady motion, off the flame if it looks like it is tightening. If it breaks, the whole filling weeps inside the mould.
- Boiling the lobstersTwenty minutes for a two-pound lobster is well past done by modern practice, and the meat is cooked a second time inside the timbale. Ten to twelve minutes at a full boil is enough; the shells and bodies still make the broth as directed.
- Archaic measuresA gill is half a cup, so the white wine is 1/2 cup and the cream 1/2 cup. A saltspoon is about a quarter teaspoon, which makes the cayenne and nutmeg assertive but not reckless. "A light teaspoon" means a scant one.
- Pans named by shapeA sauteuse is a shallow saute pan with sloping sides, as distinct from the straight-sided sautoir; any wide saucepan works for the roux. The "large plain pudding mould" is a smooth-sided charlotte or bombe mould, perhaps around two quarts, buttered cold so the film sets.
- Slack ovenA slack oven is a cool one, somewhere in the region of 250-300F. Forty minutes at that heat in a half-depth water bath should bring the centre of the forcemeat to about 150-160F; check with a thermometer rather than trusting the clock, since mould shape changes the timing considerably.
- Bread panadeAn unmeasured component in the original: soft white breadcrumbs cooked to a stiff paste with milk or broth and cooled. Figure on about a cup of the finished paste for half a pound of salmon. It binds the mousseline and keeps it from turning rubbery.
- Mortar and sieveA food processor does the pounding in seconds, but keep the salmon and the yolks cold or the farce will separate. The forcing through a sieve is not optional if you want the smooth texture the dish is built on.
- Truffle and canned mushroomsTen canned mushrooms are roughly a small drained tin; sauteed fresh mushrooms are a reasonable stand-in. A small fresh truffle can be replaced with a teaspoon of truffle paste, or simply omitted.
- The sauce that is not givenNo paprika cream sauce recipe accompanies this entry. Any velouté or bechamel finished with cream, sweet paprika and a little lobster butter serves; make it while the timbale bakes.
- YieldTwo two-pound lobsters and half a pound of salmon should roughly fill a two-quart mould, serving perhaps six to eight as a first course or four as a main.
Timbale is generally traced through French, and by way of Spanish, to the Arabic al-tabl, a drum: it named a kettledrum, then a metal cup, and later the drum-shaped mould rather than anything put in it; by the late nineteenth century it named the dish itself, a bound farce baked in a bain-marie and turned out whole. This one is squarely in the idiom of the great American hotel kitchens: The International Cook Book is attributed to Alexander Filippini, long associated with Delmonico's in New York, and the recipe shows the house method of building one luxury on another - lobster meat, its own shell broth turned into velouté, and a salmon mousseline used as edible casing. The technique descends from Careme-era garde-manger work, where a forcemeat lining let a kitchen serve a ragout in slices and made a hot dish that could be assembled hours ahead and held on ice. It is a period piece in the best sense: the labour is enormous, the flavours are precise, and the whole point is that the guest sees a smooth pale dome and never the work inside it.