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Egg Timbale
Beat six eggs just enough to mix; add one cupful and a half of milk, one teaspoonful of finely chopped parsley, five drops of onion juice (more if liked), one-quarter of a teaspoonful of paprika, or white pepper and one teaspoonful of salt. Stir well and pour the mixture into six well buttered timbale moulds; set in a deep pan nearly full of hot water and cook in a moderate oven for about twenty minutes or until firm in the center. If the oven is too hot, the timbales will be full of bubbles. Turn out carefully on a hot platter and serve with a tomato or cream sauce.
A savory baked custard, essentially a crustless quiche in individual portions. The whole thing hinges on gentle, even heat.
- Oven temperature"A moderate oven" here means 325-350F, and the lower end is safer. The warning about bubbles is the recipe telling you that an over-hot oven curdles the custard and drives steam through it, leaving it spongy and weeping.
- Beat only to mixWhisk just until the yolks and whites are combined and no more. Air beaten in now can show as bubbles in the set custard; the original blames bubbles on too hot an oven rather than on the beating, but both work against a smooth set.
- Timbale mouldsStraight-sided metal or ceramic dariole moulds of roughly 4 to 5 fl oz. Ramekins, custard cups or a muffin tin work; six moulds for six eggs plus 1 1/2 cups milk works out to something under 4 fl oz of mixture each.
- The water bath"Nearly full of hot water" means water coming most of the way up the moulds, poured hot but not boiling. A folded towel or sheet of paper in the bottom of the pan keeps the moulds from rattling and insulates the bases.
- Onion juiceFive drops is a trace of seasoning, not a flavor. Grate a piece of onion on a fine rasp and squeeze the pulp through a cloth, or press a peeled onion against a box grater.
- DonenessTwenty minutes is a fair estimate for small moulds, but judge by the center: it should be just set and barely wobble. A knife inserted at the edge comes out clean. Carryover heat continues to firm them, so pull them slightly early.
- Turning outLet them stand two or three minutes out of the water before unmoulding, then run a thin knife around the edge and invert onto a warmed plate. Buttering the moulds thoroughly, including the rim, is what makes this work.
- YieldSix timbales, one or two per person. The tomato or cream sauce is not optional in practice; the custard itself is mild and needs it.
The timbale takes its name from the French timbale, a drum, by way of the drum-shaped mould, and in nineteenth-century French cookery the word covered everything from pastry-cased forcemeats to these small moulded custards. By the 1890s the individual savory timbale had become a fixture of American middle-class cooking, favored in the cooking-school tradition for dishes that were portioned, tidy on the plate, and cooked without a cook's judgment of a skillet. Such a custard had the virtue of being assembled ahead and unmoulded when the household came down to eat. The paprika may be a small period marker as well: it appears in American books of this era as what was arguably a milder, more genteel alternative to black pepper in pale dishes where dark specks were thought unsightly.