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Sweetbread Cutlets, with Tomato Sauce
Take the required number of sweetbreads. Prepare them by blanching, then parboil them, and press them until cold. Slice them, cut them into proper shapes, egg and bread-crumb them, and fry in hot fat until they are of a bright brown colour. From the trimmings of the sweetbreads, and an equal amount of cooked ham or tongue, make a mince, and mix it with a little bechamel sauce. Cut some rounds of truffle, and ham or tongue, and heat them in a little stock. Prepare a sauce by mixing a gill and a half of tomato pulp with the same measure of white sauce; season, and add a table-spoonful of sherry; colour with carmine or cochineal. Place a ring of fried bread on the dish with a high croustade inside it; arrange the rounds of truffle and tongue on the ring, rest the cutlets against the croustade, over which should be poured the mince, so that it shows between the cutlets. Garnish with whole truffles, tongue, or cocks' combs, and pour the sauce in the dish.
A Victorian entrée built for a footed presentation: fried sweetbread medallions leaning against a bread centrepiece, with a pink tomato sauce poured around. The cooking is straightforward; the assembly is the period showpiece and can be abandoned without loss.
- The hinge: press them coldSweetbreads are soft and irregular until weighted. After blanching and parboiling, lay them between two trays with a couple of pounds on top and chill for several hours or overnight. Only then will they slice into even medallions that hold together in the pan.
- Buying and preparing sweetbreadsAsk a butcher for veal sweetbreads; the heart or belly sweetbread (the pancreas) is the plumper, rounder one and the easier to slice, while the throat sweetbread is the thymus. Soak in several changes of cold water for two to three hours to draw out blood, then blanch from cold water, refresh, and peel off the outer membrane and any tubes before pressing.
- A gill and a halfA gill is a quarter-pint, so half a cup; a gill and a half is three-quarters of a cup. The sauce is therefore three-quarters of a cup of tomato pulp to three-quarters of a cup of white sauce, about a pint and a half of liquid in cups -- that is, roughly three-quarters of a pint of finished sauce in total.
- Carmine or cochinealBoth come from the same insect source, though carmine is the more concentrated lake pigment and cochineal the extract; both are still sold as food colouring. It is there only to correct the dull brick colour of cooked tomato with cream sauce. Leave it out and nothing is lost but the pink; note that cochineal is not vegetarian and is a recognised allergen for a small number of people.
- FryingThe recipe says only 'hot fat'; moderately hot fat and two to three minutes a side will do. The sweetbreads are largely cooked by the blanching and parboiling, so the frying is chiefly for colour and crust; longer and they tighten.
- Croustade and ring of fried breadA croustade here is a tall case of bread hollowed out and fried or baked crisp, used as a stand rather than eaten. Bread of this height is hard to source now; a dome of fried bread slices, or simply a warmed platter, serves the same purpose.
- Cocks' combs and trufflesCocks' combs were a standard garnish in grand nineteenth-century service and are effectively unobtainable outside specialist suppliers. Substitute a few slices of black truffle, or omit; sliced brown mushroom sautéed in butter fills the visual role.
- Bechamel and the minceThe mince of sweetbread trimmings with ham or tongue needs only enough bechamel to bind, a few tablespoons. Make it thick, or it will run off the cutlets and thin the tomato sauce beneath.
- YieldA pair of veal sweetbreads, roughly a pound, yields eight to ten medallions and serves four as a first course. Scale sauce accordingly.
Sweetbreads occupied a high place in Victorian and Edwardian menus, ranking as an entrée served between the fish and the roast, and Cassell's devotes a run of recipes to them precisely because they were prized, expensive and endlessly adaptable. "Cutlet" here means shape rather than cut: the trimmed medallion is dressed to resemble a small chop, a habit that runs through the period's cookery in everything from veal cutlets to reformed rissoles. The arrangement described, with a bread croustade at the centre and the pieces leaning against it in a crown, is often associated with service à la russe, when dishes came to table already composed and height on the platter could be an object in itself, though composed and elevated platters were by no means confined to that style of service. The carmine is the giveaway: colour was expected to be corrected, and cochineal, a dyestuff generally traced to the cochineal insect of Central America, seems to have been a familiar enough store alongside the essences and the anchovy paste.