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Apple Timbale
(Milan.) Line a deep dish with puff paste, bake it, and fill it with sufficient apples, cooked in a syrup with vanilla and sugar to taste, and reduced rather thick. When stiff, turn out on a dish and serve with a border of candied cherries and a custard sauce, cold.
RHEIMS BISCUITS. (A favorite French dessert cake.) Beat 15 ounces of powdered sugar with the yolks of 10 and the whites of 12 eggs, add a pinch of salt and beat it over the fire while it is cooking slowly. When it has risen twice its size, take off and beat until cold. Add 6 ounces of flour and stirring well, pour it into buttered tins, shaped like lady-fingers. Dust with sugar and bake in a slow oven until a rich yellow.
Two separate recipes share this page: a baked apple case from Milan and a warm-whisked sponge finger in the style of Reims. Both assume a cook who already knows pastry and can read a batter by eye.
- What a timbale means hereNot the metal mould nor the modern rice ring, but a pastry case baked in a deep dish and unmoulded. Blind-bake the puff paste fully with weights and a lining of parchment, or the apple syrup will sit in a raw base.
- "Reduced rather thick"This is the hinge of the apple recipe. The apples must cook down to a stiff, jam-like paste that holds a cut edge, or the timbale will slump the moment it is turned out. Simmer well past the point where it looks done in the pan.
- The custard sauceA crème anglaise, served cold, made in the ordinary way with yolks, milk and sugar and cooked to about 175F. The book assumes you know it; it is not part of the instructions.
- Slow ovenFor the Rheims biscuits, read 300F. They should dry and colour to a pale gold rather than brown; the sugar dusting sets into a thin crust.
- Egg and sugar weightsFifteen ounces of powdered sugar is roughly 2 cups; six ounces of flour roughly 1 1/3 cups. Eggs of the period are often said to have run smaller than today's large eggs; if so, 10 yolks and 12 whites will give a slightly wetter batter than intended — hold back a little white if it looks slack.
- Beating over the fireThis is a warm-whisked sponge, the same method as génoise. Use a bowl over barely simmering water and keep the mixture below about 120F; if the bottom of the bowl touches the water the yolks will set into threads. Whisk off the heat until completely cold before the flour goes in.
- Folding the flour"Stirring well" is misleading. Sift the flour over the cold foam and fold it in with as few strokes as will incorporate it, or the volume built up over the heat is lost.
- Tins shaped like lady-fingersModern practice is to pipe the batter through a plain half-inch tube onto parchment rather than hunt for finger moulds. Dust with sugar twice, a few minutes apart, for the pearled surface.
- YieldThe recipe specifies no dish size or number of servings for the timbale. The biscuit batter is large by modern standards — expect roughly five to six dozen fingers.
With a Saucepan Over the Sea belongs to a turn-of-the-century genre in which an American traveller collected dishes abroad and reported them home in shorthand, trusting the reader's cook to fill the gaps — which is why the puff paste, the syrup proportions and the custard sauce all go unspecified. The pairing on this page is characteristic: a Milanese fruit case set beside a French biscuit, the two joined only by the section heading. Biscuits de Reims are related to the pink batons that still carry that city's name; those are traditionally tinted and baked twice, and the tradition attaches them to champagne, Reims being the centre of that trade — though the usual explanations for both the colour and the double baking are handed down rather than documented. This version mentions neither the colouring nor a second drying. The warm-whisked method — beating eggs and sugar over gentle heat until the volume doubles — was a standard way to raise a sponge before chemical leaveners were trusted in fine baking, and the same technique is used for génoise today.