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Oysters, Sweetbread And
Take a calf's sweetbread, soak it in cold water for an hour, boil it in salt and water for ten minutes, and then cut it into pieces about the size of an oyster, and with it two ounces of bacon. Beard a dozen large oysters, and mix them with the meat. Sprinkle over all a little pepper and salt, two table-spoonfuls of chopped parsley, a finely-minced shallot, half a tea-spoonful of powdered thyme, and four ounces of finely-grated bread-crumbs. Place the sweet-bread, oysters, and bacon alternately upon small skewers. Fry them in hot butter until they are lightly browned, then remove the skewers, and serve the oysters, etc., on a hot dish. Squeeze the juice of a lemon over them, and pour half a pint of good brown gravy upon them. Probable cost, 3s. Sufficient for five or six persons.
A late-Victorian skewered savoury, halfway between a kebab and a fried croquette. Two things decide whether it works: the sweetbread must be blanched, cooled and pressed before it is cut, and the oysters must barely meet the heat.
- The hinge: press the sweetbreadPress the sweetbread — After the ten-minute boil, drop the sweetbread into cold water, peel away the outer membrane and any gristle, then press it flat between two plates with a weight for an hour or more. The recipe does not ask for this, but it is standard practice: pressing firms the flesh and makes it easier to cut into oyster-sized pieces and to hold on a skewer.
- Oyster timingThe oysters are on the skewer only to brown, not to cook through — two to three minutes in the pan is the whole of it. Anything longer and they shrink and turn to rubber, which is why the sweetbread and bacon are pre-cooked or thin enough to keep pace.
- "Beard" the oystersThat means trimming off the dark frilly mantle and the tough muscle at the edge. Shucked oysters sold in tubs are usually already trimmed; drain them well or the coating will slide off.
- Making the crumbs stickAs written, the seasoning, parsley, shallot, thyme and 4 oz of crumbs are simply sprinkled over. In practice roll each piece in beaten egg first, then in the herbed crumbs, or the mixture will end up in the butter rather than on the meat.
- SkewersThese are what French cookery calls attereaux — short metal or wooden skewers. Soak wooden ones. The pieces are drawn off onto the dish before serving, so pack them loosely enough to slide.
- "Good brown gravy"Not pan drippings: a Victorian brown sauce, roughly a demi-glace made from browned flour and beef stock. Half a pint here is an Imperial half-pint, about 1¼ US cups. A reduced beef stock thickened lightly will do.
- BaconTwo ounces, probably streaky bacon or fat pork, cut into small squares. Unsmoked is the safer choice: heavily smoked supermarket bacon will overwhelm both the sweetbread and the oysters.
- Sourcing and yieldCalf sweetbreads come from a butcher, often frozen; weights vary considerably depending on the gland. Sufficient for five or six as a savoury or first course, not as a main dish; the 3s. costing is a late nineteenth-century figure.
Sweetbread and oysters together were a Victorian pairing of two things now considered luxuries but then unequally priced: oysters were, for much of the century, cheap, sold by the barrel and eaten by the dozen at street stalls, while calf sweetbreads were the expensive part of the dish. The skewered treatment is borrowed from French practice, where attereaux — small skewers of assorted cooked morsels, crumbed and fried — were a standard way to turn odds and ends into a course of their own. Cassell's New Dictionary of Cookery ran to thousands of such entries arranged alphabetically, and, like its other entries, this one carries a probable cost. British oyster beds declined sharply over the later nineteenth century through overfishing and disease, which reversed the economics of the dish.