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Scrambled Eggs with Sweetbreads
4 eggs 1/2 teaspoon salt 1/8 teaspoon pepper 1/2 cup milk 1 sweetbread, parboiled and cut in dice 2 tablespoons butter Beat eggs slightly, using a silver folk, add salt, pepper, milk, and sweetbread. Put butter in hot chafing-dish; when melted, pour in the mixture. Cook until of creamy consistency, constantly stirring and scraping from bottom of the pan.
A chafing-dish supper dish from the era when sweetbreads were standard restaurant fare. The whole thing hinges on gentle heat: the eggs and the milk will curdle into watery curds if the pan runs hot.
- Buying sweetbreads"One sweetbread" of the period usually meant a veal thymus or pancreas, which may run anywhere from roughly half a pound to a pound raw; expect somewhere around a cup of diced meat. Order ahead from a butcher; supermarkets rarely stock them.
- Parboiling, in fullThe recipe assumes you know the routine: soak in several changes of cold water for an hour or two until the water runs clear, then simmer 15-20 minutes in salted water with a splash of lemon or vinegar. Cool, then peel away the outer membrane and any fat or gristle before dicing.
- The chafing dishA chafing dish is a shallow pan over a spirit lamp, giving gentle heat (gentler still when the hot-water pan is used beneath). On a modern stove use a heavy skillet or saucepan over low heat, or a double boiler if you want the same forgiving pace.
- Silver forkSilver was probably specified because eggs can react with base metals and pick up a metallic taste or grey streaking. Any modern fork or whisk works; beating only slightly is the point, so the whites stay a little distinct.
- Milk proportionHalf a cup of milk to four eggs is generous by current practice and produces a soft, almost custardy scramble. It also makes the mixture slower to set, which is why constant stirring and scraping matters.
- When to stopPull the pan off the heat while the eggs still look slightly underdone and glossy. Carryover heat finishes them; cooked to firmness in the pan they will weep.
- Warming the sweetbreadThe diced sweetbread goes in cold from its parboil and chills the mixture. Let it come to room temperature first, or warm it briefly in the butter before adding the eggs, so the eggs are not held over heat waiting for it.
- YieldServes two as a main course at breakfast or supper, three or four as a small entree on toast points.
Sweetbreads were one of the prestige meats of American cooking between roughly 1880 and 1920, delicate enough to be thought suitable for invalids and refined enough for a ladies' luncheon, and cookbooks of the period run to dozens of preparations: braised, creamed, breaded and fried, or folded into eggs as here. The chafing dish is the other period marker. Chafing-dish cookery was a genuine fashion in that generation, associated with informal after-theatre suppers and with cooking at the table in a household that might not want to rouse the kitchen; whole books were devoted to what could be managed over a spirit lamp. Scrambled eggs with something costly stirred in -- sweetbreads, oysters, truffles, chipped beef -- was exactly the sort of dish the format was made for.