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Sweetbreads with Mushrooms
Parboil sweetbreads, allowing eight medium-sized ones to a can of mushrooms; cut the sweetbreads about half an inch square, stew until tender; slice mushrooms and stew in the liquor one hour, then add to the sweetbreads a teacup of cream, a tablespoonful of butter. Salt and pepper to the taste. -Mrs. George C. ८
A late-Victorian chafing-dish standard, written for cooks who already knew how to handle sweetbreads. The gaps are all in the preparation, and one of the stated times is far too long.
- Buy and soak firstSweetbreads are the thymus or pancreas of a young calf or lamb, sold fresh or frozen from a butcher. Soak them in several changes of cold water for two to three hours until the water runs clear of blood; the recipe assumes this step without saying so.
- What "parboil" means hereSimmer gently for 15-20 minutes in water with a splash of lemon juice or vinegar, then plunge into ice water. Once cold, peel away the outer membrane and any hard connective tissue before cutting into half-inch dice.
- Eight sweetbreadsMedium veal sweetbreads often run around 6-8 oz each, so this is somewhere in the region of 3 to 4 lb before trimming -- a party dish. Halving everything is sensible for a household of four.
- A can of mushroomsTin sizes varied in this period; a modern 8 oz can works. The "liquor" the recipe stews the mushrooms in is most likely the canned packing liquid, though it could equally mean the sweetbread cooking liquor. Alternatively, 8 oz of fresh mushrooms sauteed in butter, with a little stock for the liquid, gives a much better result.
- One hour is too longCanned mushrooms are already cooked, so an hour's stewing would only serve to reduce the packing liquid. Ten to fifteen minutes is enough to concentrate the liquid; the mushrooms themselves gain nothing after that.
- A teacup of creamPeriod teacups were reckoned anywhere from about 4 fl oz to three-quarters of a cup; take it as somewhere in that range. Add it off a hard boil and let the mixture barely bubble -- sweetbreads toughen and go grainy if held at a rolling simmer once the dairy is in.
- Second stewing"Stew until tender" after parboiling means a further 15-20 minutes at a bare simmer in a little stock or the mushroom liquid. The pieces should yield easily but still hold their shape.
- ServingCreamed sweetbreads of this era went onto buttered toast points, into puff-pastry patty shells or vol-au-vents, or were served straight from a chafing dish. This quantity serves eight to ten as a luncheon course.
Sweetbreads were a delicacy in American middle-class cooking from the 1870s through the 1920s, when a creamed sweetbread dish signalled a careful hostess. The name is often said to have little to do with bread or with sweetness; it has been tentatively traced to an older sense of "bread" meaning a piece of flesh, with "sweet" perhaps distinguishing the mild-tasting thymus from stronger organ meats, though the etymology remains uncertain. The canned mushrooms are the real period marker: commercially tinned mushrooms are generally thought to have become widely available in the last decades of the nineteenth century, and for a home cook they were both a convenience and a small luxury, a way to put an expensive garnish on the table in any season. The signed attribution -- one of many "Mrs." contributions in this book -- reflects the compiled community-cookbook tradition, where recipes came in as one neighbour would tell another, with all the assumed knowledge left in.