Home › Meats › Stewed Sweetbread with Champignon,
Stewed Sweetbread with Champignon,
Parboil one set of sweetbread; take all the skin and fat from them. Cut them up in a saucepan with a can of champignon also cut up, and the liquor added, one-fourth pound butter and a little red pepper. Let the champignon cook half hour before adding sweetbread. Just before taking them off, add one-half teacup of Madeira; thicken with a little flour and brown with burnt sugar. -Mrs. Granlees.
A late-Victorian ragout of sweetbreads and canned mushrooms, thickened at the last minute and darkened with caramel. Most of the work is in the sweetbreads themselves, which the recipe assumes you already know how to handle.
- What a "set" isA set of sweetbreads is the pair from one animal — the elongated throat (thymus) and the rounder heart sweetbread (pancreas), usually veal, together about 1 to 1½ lb. Buy them very fresh or frozen, and use them the day they thaw.
- Soak before you parboilStandard practice then and now is to soak the sweetbreads in several changes of cold water for an hour or two to draw out blood, then simmer 10-15 minutes in salted acidulated water, then plunge into ice water. Cold firms them so the membrane and fat peel away cleanly, which is the step the recipe glosses over.
- Press them, if you have timePeriod cookbooks often direct weighting the blanched sweetbreads between two plates for an hour. It compacts the lobes so they slice rather than crumble when cut up for the saucepan.
- ChampignonCanned French button mushrooms, sold whole or in pieces in liquid; can sizes of the period varied, so treat a modern 8 oz can as a reasonable stand-in. Modern canned mushrooms work directly; if you substitute fresh, you will need to add stock, since the recipe relies on the canning liquor for its sauce.
- Half an hour on the mushroomsCanned mushrooms are already cooked, so the long simmer is about reducing the liquor and butter into a sauce, not tenderising. Keep it at a bare simmer and watch that it does not cook dry before the sweetbreads go in.
- Don't overcook the sweetbreadThe hinge of the dish. Already parboiled, the sweetbreads need only 8-10 minutes in the sauce to heat through; longer and they turn dense and grainy, losing the custardy texture that is the whole point.
- MeasuresA quarter pound of butter is 4 oz, exactly one stick — generous but typical for the style; halve it if you want a lighter sauce. A teacup is smaller than a modern cup, roughly ⅔ cup, so one-half teacup is about 2½ fl oz of Madeira. "A little red pepper" means cayenne, a pinch or two.
- Burnt sugarCaramel colouring, made by cooking sugar dark and dissolving it in a little water. It adds colour and faint bitterness, not sweetness. A few drops of bottled gravy browning does the same job.
- YieldOne set of sweetbreads serves about four as a main course, or six on toast points or in patty shells.
Sweetbreads were prestige eating in American households of the 1890s and 1900s — expensive, delicate, and firmly associated with French cookery, which is why the mushrooms are called by their French name even though they came out of a tin. The tin is the modern touch here: commercially canned champignons made a formerly seasonal luxury available year-round, and cookbooks of the period cheerfully wrote them into dishes that a generation earlier would have demanded fresh. Madeira in the sauce follows an older English and American habit of finishing braised offal with a fortified wine, and burnt sugar was a common household colouring, though bottled brownings were themselves on the market well within the nineteenth century. The attribution to Mrs. Granlees marks this as a contributed recipe, the compiled-community format that shaped a great many turn-of-the-century American cookbooks.