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Sweetbread and Tongue Cutlets
Take some thin slices of cooked tongue and sweetbread, dip them in thick white sauce, and put them together in four layers. The top layer should be tongue, and that must be dipped in sauce on the underside only. Coat with pale aspic, and lay in the centre a star cut from a truffle or pickled walnut. Put tiny shreds of cress or chervil round.
This is cold larder work rather than cooking: everything is already cooked, and the recipe is about assembly, setting and cutting. Success depends almost entirely on how cold and how firmly pressed the layers are before you cut them.
- The hinge: chill and press before cuttingChill and press before cutting — the recipe itself says nothing about pressing or cutting; it only directs that the slices be put together in four layers, and the star "in the centre" may mean each stack was assembled from slices already cut to shape. If you do build a slab in a shallow tray, cover with parchment, weight lightly with a plate and refrigerate several hours until solid before cutting: cut a soft stack and the sauce squeezes out and the layers slide.
- Sweetbreads are not oven-ready"Cooked sweetbread" assumes the Victorian preliminary: veal or lamb sweetbreads soaked in cold water for hours with changes until the water runs clear, trimmed of membrane, blanched, then poached in stock and pressed flat under a weight while cold. Skip the pressing and they will not slice thin.
- TongueCooked ox or calf's tongue, brined or fresh, simmered until a skewer passes easily, skinned while hot and pressed. A good deli will sell it cooked and pressed by the slice, which is what this recipe effectively wants.
- "Thick white sauce"A béchamel or velouté reduced to coating consistency, roughly a sauce made with 2 tablespoons each butter and flour to a cup of milk or veal stock, seasoned and cooled to lukewarm. It must be thick enough to hold the layers as glue, not run off.
- Pale aspicClarified veal or chicken stock set with gelatine, kept nearly clear and light in colour. Reckon on a tablespoon of powdered gelatine per pint of well-flavoured stock as a minimum, and more for a firm coating set, cooled until syrupy but still liquid before spooning over; a warm aspic will soften the white sauce underneath.
- Truffle or pickled walnutThe star is cut from a slice of black truffle with a tiny aspic cutter. Pickled walnut is the period's frank economy substitute and gives the same near-black disc; a caper berry or an olive slice does the same job visually.
- Cress and chervilBoth are garnish only and both wilt quickly once they touch wet aspic. Add them at the last moment before serving.
- Yield and servingA tray built from about 8 oz each of tongue and sweetbread yields roughly ten to twelve small cutlets, served cold as an hors d'oeuvre or a buffet entrée. Keep refrigerated until service and do not leave the finished dish standing at room temperature for long, as aspic-set meats warm quickly.
Cassell's belongs to the age of the cold table, when a household with any pretension to style sent up moulded, glazed and garnished dishes that showed off the skill of the larder rather than the range. Aspic-coated meats, chaud-froid and layered "cutlets" of this kind were the stock in trade of the professional garde-manger, and books like this one carried the technique into middle-class kitchens where the point was to make small quantities of expensive material — a sweetbread, the tip of a tongue — look deliberate and abundant. The truffle star cut with a tiny cutter was a standing convention of such garnishing, and the pickled walnut named as its alternative tells you plainly how the same dish was managed on a smaller budget. Sweetbreads themselves were then a prized delicacy; their near-disappearance from British and American tables is a twentieth-century development, not a reflection of what Victorian cooks thought of them.