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Scalloped Sweetbreads
After blanching, cut or break the sweetbreads into small pieces. Make a rich cream sauce, with a pint of hot cream, a level tablespoonful of flour, a tablespoonful of butter, and 1 egg; salt and pepper. Mix this with the sweetbreads, and half fill a scallop-dish, sprinkle over a layer of buttered bread crumbs, fill the dish with the sweetbreads, put a layer of bread crumbs on the top, and bake until nicely browned. Or fill scallop-shells or paper cases with the sweetbreads, cover with buttered crumbs, and brown in a hot oven.
A gratin of veal sweetbreads in cream, of the sort that filled the fish-and-entree slot at late Victorian dinners. Almost everything that can go wrong happens before the dish reaches the oven, in the blanching and in the sauce.
- Blanching is not optionalThe recipe assumes you know the step it names in a single word. Soak the sweetbreads in several changes of cold water for two to three hours until the water runs clear, simmer them 15 to 20 minutes in salted water with a spoonful of lemon juice or vinegar, then plunge into ice water, peel away the membrane and any gristle, and press between two plates under a weight until cold. Unpressed sweetbreads tend to break into mush rather than pieces.
- Buy them fresh and use them fastSweetbreads are the thymus (throat) or pancreas (heart) glands of a young calf and are among the most perishable things in a butcher's case. Order ahead, keep them at refrigerator temperature, and cook within a day of purchase. The recipe gives no quantity; two pairs of veal sweetbreads, about 1 1/2 to 2 lb, would suit the pint of cream here.
- The sauce is deliberately looseOne tablespoon of flour to a pint of cream is a fraction of a modern roux, because the egg is doing the thickening. Cook the butter and flour together a minute, whisk in the hot cream, then temper the beaten egg with a ladle of the hot sauce before returning it to the pan. Do not let it boil after the egg goes in or it will curdle into grains.
- Pint measureA US pint is 2 cups (16 fl oz). If you are working from a British edition of this period, the pint is 20 fl oz, so the flour and butter would need scaling up by about a quarter.
- Scallop-dishA shallow, wide baking dish or gratin, chosen for the ratio of browned crumb to filling. Anything deeper turns the crumb layer soggy from below.
- Oven temperaturesThe recipe gives no temperature for the layered dish; 375-400F for 20 to 25 minutes, until the cream is bubbling at the edges, suits it. A period "hot oven" is usually reckoned at somewhere around 425-450F, and 10 to 12 minutes should do for shells and paper cases; they are small and only need the top browned, since everything in them is already cooked.
- Buttered crumbsToss fresh crumbs with melted butter until they are coated but still separate, roughly 3 tablespoons butter to a cup of crumbs. Dry crumbs on top will scorch before the filling heats through.
- YieldServes six as a first course in a gratin dish, or eight in individual shells. Paper cases are a period presentation; ramekins or ovenproof scallop shells do the same work.
Sweetbreads were a luxury of the nineteenth-century table, expensive because each calf yields only a small quantity and because they spoil quickly, and they appear frequently in American cookbooks of the 1880s and 1890s as the "entree" served between fish and roast. The word appears to have nothing to do with bread or sugar: one common suggestion traces it to an old sense of sweet meaning mild or delicate, with bread from an Old English word for a piece of flesh, though the origin is not settled. "Scalloped" here describes the method rather than the shellfish, denoting anything baked in a shallow dish under buttered crumbs, and the alternative of scallop shells and paper cases reflects the period's fondness for individually portioned service.