Skip to main content
Dessert

Timbale

A pastry dish made with short pastry, apples, and apricot marmalade, baked in a dome-shaped mold.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 10 ingredients
Jump to recipe ↓

Why it works: Flour and raisin match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 9,075 recipes. Both carry isobutyraldehyde, which smells malty, green. The science ↓

Timbale

Ingredients

Directions

The book gives no oven temperature. The 350°F (175°C) in the steps was added when the recipe was transcribed, as a starting point.

Prepare the dough

  1. Cool the softened smyrna raisins and diced preserved eedrat.

  2. Mix flour, butter, sugar, egg yolks, salt, and enough water to form a dough.

  3. Let the dough rest.

  4. Divide the dough into 8 or 10 parts and roll each into strings the thickness of thin macaroni.

Shape the timbale

  1. Grease a dome-shaped mold with butter.

  2. Place one pastry string in the center and arrange it spirally against the sides.

  3. Continue adding the remaining strings, sealing the ends together.

  4. Brush the pastry with melted butter.

  5. Fill the mold with apples and cover with a layer of pastry.

Bake and serve

  1. Bake in a portable oven at 350°F (175°C) for 50 minutes.

  2. Turn the timbale out onto a dish and top with apricot marmalade.

Recipe from a historical cookbook (Internet Archive).

Transcribed from a scanned cookbook and modernised for today's kitchens. Where the book gave no heat or time, or said "a moderate oven", the temperatures and times here may be modern equivalents rather than the book's own figures.

Explore the science

The flavor team

The pairs that carry this dish. Each one is judged two ways: how much their aromas overlap, and how often cooks already put them together.

  1. Flour + raisintop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together9,075 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  2. Apple + apricottop 2% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together777 recipes

    Shared aroma: gamma-undecalactone (peach, sweet).

  3. Flour + buttertop 12% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together124,287 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  4. Raisin + appletop 13% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together1,920 recipes

    Shared aroma: beta-damascenone (apple, rose).

  5. Sugar + raisintop 13% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together12,481 recipes

    Shared aroma: beta-damascenone (apple, rose).

Flour and butter barely smell alike, yet cooks put them together in 124,287 recipes: they work on texture and structure more than aroma.

Ranks compare each pair with 20,000 random ingredient pairs on CompKitchen. How we score pairs

What each ingredient does

All-purpose flour
Forms the structure of the dough that holds the timbale's shape.
Unsalted butter
Adds richness and tenderness to the pastry and helps it brown.
Egg yolks
Add richness and help bind the dough together.
Sugar
Sweetens the pastry and helps it brown in the oven.
Smyrna raisins
Add sweetness and chewy moisture to the filling.
Preserved eedrat
Adds sweet, aromatic citrus flavour and moisture to the filling.

The step that matters

Sealing the pastry strings. Strings must be joined and sealed at their ends so the crust forms one continuous shell. Gaps let the filling leak and weaken the structure during baking.

Swap the apricot

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (flour, butter, sugar, egg, raisin, apple):

  1. Vanillafits better
  2. Figfits better
  3. Pearfits about as well
  4. Apricotthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against flour, butter, sugar, egg, raisin, apple. Candidates are from the same food group and used in at least 100 recipes.

“What each ingredient does” and “The step that matters” were written by Claude from this recipe’s own method and reviewed in samples by CompKitchen.

More timbale recipes

Macaroni 29Chicken 24Fish 15Salmon 11Macaroni and Cheese 8Chestnut 7 See all 4 →

You might also like

Apple PuddingApple Pudding256 recipesApple CakeApple Cake80 recipesApple MeringueApple Meringue75 recipesDried Apple CakeDried Apple Cake51 recipes