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Sweetbreads with Mushroom Puree
Blanch and prepare sweetbreads, by cutting away all the windpipes and fibrous nerves. When they are quite cool, put under a weight to flatten well. Dip them in melted Crisco and broil, without browning too much, over a clear fire. Put sweetbreads on very thin slices of round toast and serve with this puree poured over all: Chop 1 dozen fresh mushrooms and put them to cook with 1/2 pint of cream and 1/2 cup fine breadcrumbs. Cook them in double boiler till mushrooms can be pressed through rather fine sieve. Return this puree to fire, season with salt and white pepper, and let get as hot as possible before using it for sweetbreads.
Spring Lamb Steak, a la Minute Rub some fillets of spring lamb steak with salt and pepper, and fry them gently in 3 tablespoons Crisco which has been melted in an iron frying pan, until thoroughly cooked. Remove from frying pan and keep hot. Put 12 large fresh mushroom caps in pan and cook until tender, adding 1/4 cup cream and salt and pepper to taste. Put lamb steak on hot platter, garnish with mushroom caps, and pour sauce around.
Two dishes share this page; both lean on the same pan of cream and mushrooms. The sweetbreads are the fussier of the pair, and almost all the work happens before they touch the fire.
- "Blanch and prepare" is the whole jobThe original assumes you know the drill. Soak the sweetbreads in several changes of cold water for two to three hours until they lose their pinkness, then simmer gently 15-20 minutes in salted, acidulated water, plunge into ice water, and peel away the membrane, ducts and connective tissue. Only then are they cool enough to press.
- Pressing under a weightLay the peeled sweetbreads between two flat plates or trays with a couple of tins on top and refrigerate at least an hour, or overnight. This is not decorative: it compacts the lobes so they broil evenly instead of falling apart.
- CriscoThe book was published to sell it, so it appears in everything. Clarified butter or a neutral oil brushed on does the same job here; the point is a thin fat coating that keeps the surface from drying under direct heat.
- "A clear fire"Coals burned down past the smoking stage, with no flame. A gas broiler at high heat or a grill over ash-covered coals is the equivalent. Three to four minutes a side, turning once, is enough for pressed sweetbreads that have already been poached.
- "Without browning too much"They should take a pale gold. Sweetbreads are delicate offal and go dry and grainy if pushed dark; the poaching has already cooked them through, so this stage is for surface and heat only.
- The puree measuresHalf a pint of cream is one cup. A dozen fresh mushrooms is genuinely vague -- reckon on about 8 oz of button or cremini. The half cup of breadcrumbs is a thickener, so use dry crumbs, not fresh, or the puree will be pasty.
- Sieving and reheatingCook in the double boiler 20-25 minutes until the mushrooms are soft enough to push through a fine sieve; a blender does it faster but the sieve still catches the fibrous bits. Get the puree properly hot before it goes over the sweetbreads, since it will cool the instant it hits the toast.
- YieldA pair of veal sweetbreads serves three to four as a first course, or two generously. The lamb steak recipe gives no quantity of meat at all ('some fillets'); the 12 mushroom caps and 3 tablespoons of fat suggest it was scaled for about four.
A Calendar of Dinners was written by Marion Harris Neil for Procter & Gamble to promote Crisco, which reached the market in 1911 as the first widely sold hydrogenated vegetable shortening; that explains why an ingredient with no culinary tradition behind it turns up in a broiled sweetbread and a lamb steak alike. The dish belongs to the Escoffier-era restaurant repertoire that American hostesses of the 1910s were drawing on -- ris de veau, poached and pressed and set on a round of toast under a cream sauce, was a familiar formal first course, and mushroom puree a common partner. Sweetbreads are the thymus or the pancreas of a young calf or lamb, and their retreat from home kitchens probably owes more to supply than to taste: they require the kind of prompt, whole-animal butchery that a neighbourhood butcher once did as a matter of course.