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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CHAPTER XLIV: Parboil
Parboil the sweetbreads; when cold, dip them in beaten egg and cracker crumbs, sprinkle salt over them, and fry in hot fat. Stir together the butter and flour, then set the pan back a MRS. CURTIS'S COOKBOOK little and add gradually the milk; stir until smooth. Season with salt and pepper, finely chopped celery, and cook about two minutes. Strain the sauce over the sweetbreads.
Sweetbread Croquettes. 2 sweetbreads, 1 can mushrooms, 1 tablespoonful flour, 1 tablespoonful butter, cupful cream, 2 yolks eggs.
Parboil the sweetbreads and cut them in small pieces; also cut the mushrooms. Put into a saucepan the flour and butter, and when made smooth, add the cream; heat, then add the sweetbreads and mushrooms.
Sweetbreads à la Newburg. 1 cupful cream, 1½ cupfuls sweetbreads, Yolks 3 eggs, ½ teaspoonful salt, Few grains cayenne.
Heat the cream; add the sweetbreads parboiled and cut in cubes. Beat the yolks of the eggs; add the salt and cayenne, and stir into the cream. Stir until thickened slightly; serve at once.
Sweetbread Fritters.
Parboil sweetbreads, cut in small pieces, season with salt, pepper, and chopped parsley; dip in fritter batter and fry in deep fat. over.
This is a run of four sweetbread preparations printed as a block, with the tail of one sauce recipe attached to the head of the next. Read them as separate dishes and expect to supply some steps the original assumes you know.
- What sweetbreads actually areSweetbreads are the thymus and pancreas glands of a calf or lamb, not brain or spinal cord. The warning attached above conflates them with nervous-system tissue; the relevant precaution today is simply to buy from a butcher operating under current inspection rules, which exclude specified risk materials from the food supply.
- Parboiling, in fullThe books of this period take the preparation for granted. Soak the sweetbreads in cold water an hour or two with several changes until they pale, then bring them slowly to a bare simmer in salted acidulated water for 15-20 minutes, plunge into ice water, and peel away the membrane and any tubes. Press between two plates with a weight until cold and firm; unpressed sweetbreads fall apart when sliced or breaded.
- The orphaned sauceThe passage beginning "Stir together the butter and flour" belongs to the fried sweetbreads above it and gives no quantities. A standard white sauce ratio of 1 tablespoon each butter and flour to 1 cup milk fits the style and the two-minute cooking time given.
- A can of mushroomsA period 'can' of mushrooms was small by modern standards, and the drained weight less again. About 6-8 oz of fresh mushrooms, sliced and cooked dry in butter first, gives a closer result than modern tinned ones, which are softer and more brine-flavoured.
- The croquettes stop halfwayAs printed, the recipe makes only the filling and never mentions the two egg yolks in the ingredient list. Temper the yolks into the hot cream mixture, cook until very thick, then spread on a plate and chill several hours until firm before shaping, breading, and frying. Croquette mixtures that are not thoroughly cold burst in the fat.
- Newburg will curdleThis is the hinge of the à la Newburg. Once the beaten yolks go in, keep the pan below a simmer and stir constantly; the moment it boils the eggs scramble and the sauce breaks. "Stir until thickened slightly" means it coats a spoon, no more.
- Frying temperaturesFor the crumbed sweetbreads and the fritters, 350-365F is right. Deep fat much hotter colours the crumbs before the interior heats through.
- YieldA pair of veal sweetbreads is roughly a pound or so before trimming, and serves about four as a first course, two or three as a main. The Newburg, at 1½ cupfuls of cooked sweetbread, is about four small servings.
Sweetbreads were a staple of American hotel and club cookery from the 1870s through the 1920s, appearing on menus in a wide range of forms: creamed, larded and braised, in patty shells, in croquettes, and paired endlessly with mushrooms. Their appeal was texture and mildness, which made them a suitable delicacy for invalids and for ladies' luncheons alike, and their availability owed much to industrial slaughtering, which produced offal in quantities local butchery never had. The Newburg treatment here is a domestic descendant of a dish generally traced to Delmonico's in New York in the 1870s, said to have been named for a customer and then respelled after a falling-out; the same cream, yolk and cayenne formula was applied to lobster, crab, chicken and, as here, sweetbreads. The bracketing of four variations on a single ingredient is typical of turn-of-the-century household compendia, which organised by material rather than by course and expected the cook to already know how to parboil, press and trim.