Home › Chicken and Game › Squab Timbale
Squab Timbale
(Timballo di piccioni) Chop together some ham, onion, celery and carrot, add a piece of butter and place on the fire with one or two squabs, according to the number of guests. Add the giblets from the squabs and some more of chicken, if at hand.
Season with salt and pepper, and when the pigeons are browned, pour over some broth to complete the cooking, taking care, however, that the sauce does not become too liquid. Remove the latter and place in it some macaroni that has been half cooked and drained. Keep the macaroni in the sauce on the fire, stirring them. Make a well reduced Bechamel sauce, then cut the squabs at the joints, removing the neck, the legs and the bones of the back, when you would not bone them entirely, which would be better. Cut the giblets in small pieces and remove the soft part of the onion.
When the macaroni have absorbed the sauce, season them with grated cheese, pieces of butter, diamonds or squares of ham, a taste of nutmeg and some truffles or dry mushrooms previously softened in water. Add finally the Bechamel sauce and mix the whole.
Take a sufficiently large mold, butter it and line it with soft pastry. Put everything in the mold, or timbale, cover it with the same pastry and put in the oven. Take out of the mold and serve hot. Three quarters of a pound of macaroni and two pigeons are enough for ten persons. 50
A braise, a pasta dressing and a pastry case, assembled in one mold. The order matters more than any single quantity: the macaroni finishes cooking in the squab braising liquid, and everything else is folded in afterward.
- The hinge: cook the macaroni in the sauce, not in waterBoil it to roughly half the package time, drain it, and let it finish in the strained braising liquid over heat until the liquid is absorbed. If the sauce is too thin at that point the timbale will be sodden and will not slice; reduce it before the pasta goes in.
- SquabA squab is a young pigeon, about four weeks old, sold at roughly 1 lb dressed. Butchers and game suppliers carry them frozen. Two of them for ten people is a small amount of meat by modern expectations, so treat the dish as pasta with squab rather than a bird course.
- BoningThe original says boning entirely "would be better," and it is right. Bones buried in a pastry-cased pasta are unpleasant to eat. Bone the breasts and thighs after braising and cut the meat into pieces the size of the macaroni.
- "Soft pastry"This most likely renders pasta frolla, the enriched short crust used for Italian timballi; in savoury versions the sugar is reduced or left out. A standard pie dough will work but will be more brittle; roll it thicker than you would for a tart, since it has to hold its shape when unmolded.
- OvenThe original gives none. Bake at 375F until the crust is set and evenly golden, 45 minutes to an hour for a 2-quart mold. Let it rest 10 minutes before turning out or the filling will slump.
- The moldA charlotte mold, a deep straight-sided cake pan or a springform of about 2 quarts. Butter it generously and line the base with a disc of parchment; a timbale that sticks cannot be rescued.
- Dried mushroomsSoak porcini in warm water 20 to 30 minutes, then lift them out rather than pouring, and strain and add the soaking liquid to the braise. Truffles, if used, go in at the very end off the heat.
- "Diamonds of ham"Lozenges cut from a thick slice of prosciutto cotto or unsmoked cured ham, about half an inch across. They are a garnish worked through the pasta, not a substitute for the ham chopped into the initial soffritto.
- YieldTen as written, with three quarters of a pound of macaroni. Short tubes such as ziti or rigatoni hold the sauce best; long macaroni broken into lengths is closer to the period practice.
The timballo is named for the drum-shaped mold it is baked in -- the Italian word comes by way of the French timbale -- and the form belongs to the grand tradition of Italian pasta pies in which a crust conceals a filling revealed only at the table. Maria Gentile's The Italian Cook Book (1919) drew heavily on Pellegrino Artusi's La scienza in cucina, and this recipe carries Artusi's habits with it: the numbered entry, the conversational asides about what "would be better," the assumption that the cook already knows how to make a bechamel. Pigeon was a standard domestic bird in Italy well into the twentieth century, raised in towers and cotes for the table and worth using whole, giblets included, which is why the recipe folds the trimmings back into the filling rather than discarding them. A grand pasta pie of this kind is described at length in Lampedusa's Il Gattopardo, and the timpano familiar to American audiences from the film Big Night belongs to the same family.