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This recipe calls for animal brains or related nervous-system tissue. Cattle brain and spinal tissue can transmit bovine spongiform encephalopathy (BSE), the cause of variant Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease in humans, which is fatal and has no treatment.
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Bechamel Sweetbreads
One pair sweetbreads.
One tablespoonful of flour.
One gill of cream.
One-half teaspoonful of salt.
One gill of stock.
Six mushrooms, in quarters.
Yolks of two eggs.
Wash and parboil sweetbreads, cut with a silver knife in small pieces. Make the sauce just as before, only use two yolks instead of one. -Mrs. Amey Fallon, Wayne, Pa.
A community-cookbook shorthand recipe that assumes you have already read the béchamel instructions a page or two earlier. The gaps are fillable, but you need to know what is missing.
- "The sauce just as before"The recipe leans on a preceding bechamel that is not reproduced here. On the usual pattern it would be: melt butter, stir in the tablespoon of flour, cook it a minute without colour, then whisk in the stock and cream and simmer until it coats a spoon. No butter is listed in this entry, presumably because it was given with the earlier sauce.
- A gillHalf a cup, four fluid ounces. So half a cup of cream and half a cup of stock, giving roughly a cup of finished sauce for one pair of sweetbreads.
- Buying and soakingA "pair" means the two glands from one animal. Veal sweetbreads run somewhere around a pound a pair; lamb are much smaller. Soak in several changes of cold water for a few hours until they pale, which draws out blood and is a step the recipe does not mention.
- ParboilingSimmer 15 to 20 minutes in salted water with a splash of vinegar or lemon, then plunge into cold water. Once cool, peel away the membrane and any hard connective tissue; press between two plates under a weight if you want firm, sliceable pieces.
- The silver knifeCarbon steel blades of the period discoloured pale flesh and fruit on contact. Any stainless knife does the job now, and the instruction can be ignored.
- The egg yolksThis is the hinge. Beat the two yolks with a little of the hot sauce to temper them, return the mixture to the pan off direct heat, and stir until it thickens. If the sauce boils after the yolks go in, it will curdle and no amount of whisking brings it back.
- MushroomsSix button mushrooms quartered is a modest amount, about 3 oz. Saute them separately in butter and add them at the end, or they will leach water into the sauce and thin it.
- Yield and servingEnough for three or four as a first course. Creamed sweetbreads of this kind were commonly served in pastry shells or on toast, or from a chafing dish.
Sweetbreads, the thymus and pancreas glands of a calf or lamb, were a standard genteel meat in American cooking well into the twentieth century, prized for their mildness and delicate texture and treated as a delicacy before they drifted onto restaurant menus as a luxury. The sauce takes its name from Louis de Bechameil, a steward in the household of Louis XIV, to whom it is traditionally rather than documentably credited; in American books of the period "bechamel" covered a range of white sauces, classically milk-based, though versions built on stock and cream were common, sometimes enriched with egg yolk as it is here. The recipe's terseness and its attribution to a named contributor from Wayne, Pennsylvania, mark it as a subscription or club cookbook entry, where recipes were printed as submitted and cross-referred to one another rather than written out in full each time.</historyfield>