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Sweetbreads en Casserole
Clean two pairs of sweetbreads. Cook in boiling, salted, acidulated water fifteen minutes, then plunge into cold water, after which break or cut into pieces.
Melt three tablespoons of butter in an omelet pan, add one-quarter cup of onion, one-quarter cup of carrot cut fine, cook three minutes, then add the sweetbreads.
When nicely browned put into the casserole, add a bit of bay leaf, two cups of white stock, salt and pepper to taste, cover and cook slowly for half an hour.
Shape a dozen potato balls with a French vegetable cutter, fry in two tablespoons of butter, add the caps of a dozen fresh peeled mushrooms and combine with the contents of the casserole, adding more stock if necessary. Cook fifteen minutes, then remove the cover to brown the sweetbreads. Re-cover and serve in the casserole.
A stovetop braise rather than an oven dish, and the success of it rests almost entirely on the preparation of the sweetbreads before any butter is melted.
- The hinge: soak, blanch, peel"Clean" is doing a lot of work here. Soak the sweetbreads in several changes of cold water for an hour or two until they lose their pinkness, blanch as directed, chill, then strip off the outer membrane and any tubes while they are cold and firm. Skip this and the pieces turn tough and taste faintly of liver.
- Two pairsVeal sweetbreads run roughly 12 oz to a pound a pair, so figure 1 1/2 to 2 lb total. Order them from a butcher; supermarket meat cases rarely carry them. A pair is the elongated throat sweetbread (thymus) and the plumper heart sweetbread.
- Acidulated waterAbout a tablespoon of lemon juice or white vinegar per quart of salted water. The acid keeps the sweetbreads pale and firms them enough to handle.
- Omelet pan and casseroleThe omelet pan is simply a shallow skillet for browning. 'Casserole' in 1900 usage could mean a lidded earthenware or metal dish used in the oven as well as a heavy lidded pot used on the range top; the recipe does not say which, and a Dutch oven or braiser will serve. 'Cook slowly' means a bare simmer over low heat.
- White stockUnsalted veal or chicken stock, light in color and not reduced. Season at the end rather than the beginning, since two cups will concentrate over the 45 minutes of covered cooking.
- Potato ballsA French vegetable cutter is a parisienne scoop, the same tool as a melon baller. Cut the balls from peeled raw potatoes, keep them in cold water until needed, and dry them before they go into the butter or they will steam rather than color.
- Mushroom timingCaps added for the last fifteen minutes are right; they release their liquid into the sauce and hold their shape. Whole button or cremini caps work, and modern mushrooms need wiping rather than peeling.
- The final browningUncovering over low stovetop heat browns very little. Slide the uncovered pot under a hot broiler for a few minutes instead, then re-cover to carry it to the table.
- YieldServes four generously as a main course, or six as part of a longer menu.
Sweetbreads, the thymus and pancreas of a calf or lamb, were among the most prized offal in Anglo-American cooking from the mid-nineteenth century into the 1930s, delicate enough to sit at a ladies' luncheon and expensive enough to signal a good table. Their presence in a general household book like this one shows how much wider the American butcher's counter was then than now. The dish itself resembles Escoffier-era hotel cooking translated for the home: a blanch, a brown, a braise in white stock, and a garnish of turned potatoes and mushroom caps, all served in the cooking vessel. The vogue for cooking and serving "en casserole" swept American cookbooks around 1900 and is usually traced to French bourgeois practice, where the point was that nothing was transferred and nothing was lost. Sweetbreads fell out of general use in the United States after mid-century, and later restrictions on beef offal in some markets, tied to BSE controls, narrowed the supply further.