Timbale (food)


In cooking, timbale derived from the word for "drum", also known as Timballo, can refer to either a kind of pan used for baking, or the food that is cooked inside such a pan.
Timbale pans can be large, or they can be small enough to be single-portion. Timbales typically narrow toward the bottom. Bundt pans, angelfood cake pans, and springform pans can be substituted for purpose-made timbale bakeware.
As a dish, a timbale is a "deep dish" filling completely enclosed in a crust. The crust can be sheet pastry, slices of bread, rice, even slices of vegetable. Sartu di Riso is a rice crust timbale. Timballo di Melanzana uses overlapping strips of eggplant. The filling can be a wide range of pre-cooked meats, sausages, cheeses, vegetables, and shaped pastas combined with herbs and spices and red or white "gravy", thickened with breadcrumbs if necessary. The assembled dish is then baked to brown the crust and heat the filling to serving temperature.

Cultural references

There is a detailed description of a rich macaroni timbale in Giuseppe Tomasi di Lampedusa's novel The Leopard:
"The burnished gold of the crusts, the fragrance of sugar and cinnamon they exuded, were but preludes to the delights released from the interior when the knife broke the crust first came a smoke laden with aromas, then chicken-livers, hard-boiled eggs, sliced ham, chicken, and truffles in masses of piping-hot, glistening macaroni, to which the meat juice gave an exquisite hue of suède."