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Mayonnaise of Sweetbreads
Clean and parboil one pair of sweetbreads, then throw them into cold water for a half hour. Remove the fat and skin, and cover them with fresh boiling water; add a teaspoonful of salt and simmer gently for twenty minutes. When done, stand away to cool. When cold, cut into thin slices. Wash and dry the tender leaves from one head of lettuce. Rub the bottom of a soup dish with onion and make in it nearly a half pint of mayonnaise. Place a thin slice of onion in the centre of your salad dish, arrange the lettuce leaves around it; mix the sweetbreads carefully with the mayonnaise, and put in the centre of the dish. Serve.
This is a delicious salad, and if prepared as directed will have only the faintest suspicion of onion.
Tarragon vinegar added to the mayonnaise is a great improvement.
A cold composed salad that depends almost entirely on how the sweetbreads are handled before they ever meet the mayonnaise. Get the soaking and firming right and the rest is assembly.
- SourcingSweetbreads are glands of a calf or lamb: the thymus (the ragged "throat" sweetbread) and the pancreas (the plump "heart" or "stomach" one). They often have to be ordered from a butcher; ask for veal sweetbreads and use them promptly, as they spoil quickly.
- What parboil means hereA brief first boil, only long enough to set the flesh so the membrane can be pulled away. The half hour in cold water that follows draws out blood and helps keep the finished slices pale.
- The second simmerTwenty minutes at a bare simmer, as directed; they are better not boiled hard, which coarsens the texture. Lamb sweetbreads are smaller and will want less time.
- Press them coldThe recipe says only to stand them away to cool. Cooling them under a plate with a light weight is a common practice and makes thin slices hold together better.
- Half a pint of mayonnaiseOne cup. If you make it from scratch it will contain raw yolk; use pasteurized eggs, or a good jarred mayonnaise thinned with a little tarragon vinegar, if you are serving anyone frail, pregnant or very young.
- The onion trickRubbing the cut face of an onion around the bowl and burying one thin slice at the centre is the whole seasoning strategy. Chopped onion would overwhelm sweetbreads, which are mild to the point of delicacy.
- Yield and serviceOne pair of veal sweetbreads with a cup of mayonnaise will serve roughly four as a first course. Dress and plate it shortly before serving; it does not hold well once the lettuce is under dressing.
Sweetbreads were a genuine luxury on nineteenth-century American tables, ranked with terrapin and canvasback duck, and a mayonnaise of sweetbreads was the sort of dish that signalled a carefully considered dinner. Cold preparations of this kind suited the logic of the period's summer cookery: anything that could be poached early, chilled, and then dressed cold at the last minute spared the cook a second encounter with the range. The tarragon vinegar recommended for the mayonnaise was a standard bottled pantry item then, often said to be French in origin and traditionally credited with lifting cold sauces for veal and poultry. Offal of this kind has since fallen out of everyday American shopping, which is why a dish once considered a mark of refinement now reads as adventurous.