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Timbale Molds
1 teaspoonful melted Crisco 3/4 cupful flour 1 egg 1/2 teaspoonful salt 1/2 cupful milk Sift flour and salt into bowl, add egg well beaten, milk and Crisco. Beat five minutes then strain into cup. Have kettle of Crisco on fire and heat until cube of bread will become golden brown in sixty seconds. Heat timbale iron in hot Crisco, let stand two or three minutes, then drain and dip into batter to half inch of top of iron; submerge in Crisco and fry until batter is crisp and lightly browned. Remove from iron and drain on paper. If batter does not cling to iron, then iron is not hot enough. If Crisco sizzles considerably, and batter case spreads out and drops from the iron, mold is too hot. If iron is lowered too far into batter the case will come over top of iron and be difficult to remove. Creamed dishes of all kinds can be served in these cases. Cold custards, cooked vegetables, fruits or ices may be also served in the cases.
Sufficient for forty cases. 2 onions
This is batter for fried timbale cases — the crisp edible cups made on a long-handled iron mold, close cousins to Scandinavian rosettes. The whole thing hinges on the temperature of the iron.
- Ignore the trailing "2 onions"The two words at the end appear to be a stray line from an adjacent recipe. They have nothing to do with the batter.
- Crisco means shorteningThe book is a Procter & Gamble promotional cookbook, so every fat is Crisco. Any neutral frying fat or oil works; a teaspoon of melted shortening or oil in the batter itself is all that is called for.
- Frying temperatureA bread cube browning in sixty seconds is roughly 360-375F, the usual reading for that test. Use a thermometer and hold it there.
- The iron is the whole trickPreheat the mold in the fat for the full two or three minutes, then drain it for a second before dipping. A cold iron sheds the batter; a scorching one makes the batter blister off. If the first case fails, re-heat and try again rather than adjusting the batter.
- Dip depthHalf an inch from the top of the iron, as written, is not fussiness. Batter that laps over the rim locks the case onto the mold and it tears coming off.
- Strain and restStrain -- Straining after beating removes lumps that would keep the coating from being even.
- Yield and scaleForty cases from three-quarters of a cup of flour tells you how thin the shells are. For a dinner of eight allow two or three each, and fry them the same day — they soften within hours in a humid kitchen.
- FillingFill at the last moment. Creamed vegetables, chicken à la king, or ices as the original suggests all release moisture that collapses the case in minutes.
The Story of Crisco (1913) was published by Procter & Gamble to teach American cooks what to do with a fat that had no precedent in their kitchens: hydrogenated cottonseed oil, introduced in 1911, neither butter nor lard nor the drippings a household would otherwise have saved. Frying recipes did much of the persuading, since the selling point was a shortening that stayed bland and could be strained and reused. The dish itself is older than the book. Timbale comes through French from an Arabic word for a kettledrum, describing the shape of the mold, and by the late nineteenth century the fried timbale case had become a fixture of genteel American entertaining, a way to present creamed oysters or sweetbreads in something showier than a dish. A related iron, in Scandinavian households, turns out rosettes dusted with sugar.<br><br>The inclusion under "Vegetarian Dishes" says something about the period's categories: the case is meatless, whatever ends up inside it.