Important: Safety Warning
This recipe calls for animal brains or related nervous-system tissue. Cattle brain and spinal tissue can transmit bovine spongiform encephalopathy (BSE), the cause of variant Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease in humans, which is fatal and has no treatment.
This information has been left in for historical purposes but should not be acted upon.
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Sweetbread Croquettes
2 cups cooked and chopped sweetbreads 4 tablespoons chopped mushrooms 2 tablespoons butter 2 tablespoons Gold Medal flour 1 teaspoon salt 1 cup cream 1/3 teaspoon white pepper A dust of nutmeg 1/2 teaspoon chopped parsley 2 eggs 1 tablespoon lemon juice Mix the salt, pepper, nutmeg, parsley and lemon juice with the mushrooms and sweetbreads, and set aside to season while making a white sauce according to directions with the butter, flour and cream. Add the meat to the sauce and lastly the beaten egg. Set away to cool or stiffen for two or three hours, then shape, crumb and fry according to directions above. Serve with Mushroom, White Sauce or Bechamel Yellow Sauce.--Miss Parloa, "Kitchen Companion."
A classic croquette built on a stiff cream sauce, with the usual 1900 assumption that the cook has already read the general directions for white sauce and for frying elsewhere in the book. One point of clarification first: sweetbreads are the thymus and pancreas of a calf or lamb, not brain or spinal tissue. Veal thymus is still sold by butchers and is not classed as specified risk material in the United States.
- The hinge: chill it hardThe mixture must be genuinely cold and firm before shaping; the recipe allows two or three hours. Warm or slack croquette paste splits in the fat and empties itself into the pan.
- Preparing the sweetbreadsThe recipe starts with them already "cooked and chopped." That means soaked in cold water until the water runs clear, membrane peeled, then simmered gently 15-20 minutes, cooled under a weight to press them flat, and chopped. About 1 to 1 1/4 lb raw yields the 2 cups called for.
- CreamUse heavy cream. Two tablespoons each of butter and flour to a full cup of liquid gives a fairly stiff sauce, which is what holds the croquette together; milk or half-and-half will not set as reliably.
- "Beaten egg"Two eggs are listed, but the method says only to add "the beaten egg" to the mixture; whether both were meant for the filling or one was reserved for the coating in the general frying directions is not stated. One beaten egg off the heat is enough to bind it, and the second, thinned with a tablespoon of water, can serve for dipping before crumbing.
- Frying temperatureDeep fat at 375F, croquettes fried in small batches for 2 to 3 minutes until deep gold. Everything inside is already cooked, so the object is only to set the crust.
- CrumbingEgg and crumb twice for a coating that will not leak. Fine dry crumbs, not fresh, and let the coated croquettes rest 20 minutes in the refrigerator before they go into the fat.
- Nutmeg and white pepperGrate the nutmeg fresh; "a dust" means no more than a pinch. White pepper is specified so the pale filling stays unspecked, and it is worth keeping for that reason.
- YieldRoughly a dozen cork-shaped croquettes, serving four as an entree course or six as part of a larger meal.
Sweetbreads occupied a high place on American menus between about 1880 and 1920, treated as a delicate white meat fit for luncheons, invalids and formal entree courses, and croquettes were the standard way to stretch an expensive organ with a cup of cream sauce. The attribution is to Maria Parloa, whose Kitchen Companion appeared in 1887; she had founded a cooking school in Boston and was one of the most widely trusted domestic authorities of her generation, which is exactly why a flour miller's promotional cookbook would want her name attached to a recipe. Gold Medal's book carries that attribution explicitly. The dish fell out of fashion as offal generally did after mid-century, though sweetbreads never disappeared entirely from restaurant cooking.