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SWEETBREADS (au Gratin)
Take the remains of sweetbreads which have been stewed in white or brown sauce. Put them in a pie-dish, pour the cold sauce over them, and cover the surface with finely-grated bread-crumbs. Lay little pieces of butter here and there on the top, and put the dish in a brisk oven. When it is hot throughout it is done enough. If the top is not brightly browned, a salamander or red-hot shovel may be held over it to make it so.
A leftovers dish rather than a recipe from scratch: it assumes you already have sweetbreads stewed in sauce sitting in the larder. The only real work is getting the top browned before the inside overcooks.
- What a sweetbread isThe thymus (throat bread) or pancreas (heart bread) of a calf or lamb, not a sweet and not a bread. Order them ahead from a butcher; they are sold fresh or frozen and want soaking, blanching, pressing and trimming before any stewing, all of which this recipe presumes was done yesterday.
- Brisk ovenRoughly 400-450F; period tables vary. The point is speed: everything in the dish is already cooked, so you are heating it through and setting the crumb crust, not baking it.
- Salamander or red-hot shovelA salamander was an iron plate on a handle heated in the fire and held above food to brown the surface. Use the broiler for two or three minutes at the end, watching it, or a kitchen blowtorch.
- Pie-dishAn oval earthenware baking dish, usually fairly deep. Something wide and shallow works better here, since it gives more browned crumb per portion and heats through faster.
- Cold sauceThe sauce needs to be loose enough to pour when cold, which a well-made velouté or brown sauce rarely is straight from the refrigerator. Slacken it with a spoonful or two of stock or cream before it goes over the meat.
- Breadcrumbs and butterFresh finely grated crumbs, not dried packaged ones, which scorch before the dish is hot. The dotted butter is what carries the browning; be generous, roughly a tablespoon for a dish serving two.
- Heating through"Hot throughout" for reheated meat in sauce means 165F at the centre. Twenty minutes at 425F suits a shallow dish; check with a thermometer rather than by the look of the top, which browns long before the middle is ready.
- YieldDepends entirely on how much is left over; a small pie-dish of it makes a light supper or first course for one or two, with toast or plain boiled potatoes.
Sweetbreads were a genteel invalid food and a supper-dish staple in Victorian and Edwardian Britain, mild in flavour, soft in texture and expensive enough to signal a good table. The title places this entry among the au gratin preparations, a French term that in nineteenth-century English cookery generally meant a dish crusted with crumbs and browned on top rather than anything to do with cheese. The frankness about using "the remains" is characteristic of such books. Kitchen ranges of the period browned unevenly, and a separate heated iron -- or, as here, the fire shovel taken red from the grate -- was one remedy for colouring a surface from above.