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Sweetbread and Mushroom Pates
Ten sweetbreads, parboiled, skinned and all the fat removed; cut into small pieces. Add one even teaspoonful salt, one can of French mushrooms. Slice thin, add to juice one teaspoonful salt, one teaspoonful pepper, one saltspoonful powdered mace, lump of butter size of guinea egg. Simmer slowly twenty minutes. Add sweetbreads dredged with one heaping spoonful corn starch, well mixed in the sweetbread. Let it boil up once, stirring to prevent sticking. Serve in puff paste shapes, hot. A little chopped parsley may be added-Mrs. R.R.
A late-nineteenth-century entree of veal sweetbreads and tinned mushrooms in a starch-thickened cream of their own liquor, spooned into baked puff-paste cases. The quantities are for a party; scale down freely.
- Scale and yieldTen sweetbreads is banquet cookery — enough filling for twenty or more pastry cases. Two pairs of veal sweetbreads (about 1 1/2 lb) with a 6-8 oz tin or 8 oz of fresh mushrooms serves six comfortably.
- Soak before parboilingThe recipe assumes a step the period took for granted: soak the sweetbreads in several changes of cold water for a few hours until they whiten, then parboil 3-5 minutes, cool, and peel away membrane and fat. Pressing them under a weighted plate while they chill makes slicing far cleaner.
- Guinea egg of butterA guinea fowl egg is smaller than a hen's — roughly 1 1/2 oz of butter, or about 3 tablespoons.
- SaltspoonfulA saltspoon is a quarter teaspoon. The mace at that quantity is meant to be felt but not identified.
- The mushroom liquor is the sauceThere is no stock or cream here — the whole sauce is the canned mushrooms' juice, butter and cornstarch. A modern drained tin yields little liquid; make up the shortfall with veal or chicken stock, or the dish will be dry. If using fresh mushrooms, sweat them in the butter and add about a cup of stock.
- Salt twice overSalt appears in two places, totalling two teaspoons for ten sweetbreads. With modern tinned mushrooms, which are already brined, add the second teaspoon only after tasting.
- Don't boil the sweetbreads againOnce the parboiled, cornstarch-dredged sweetbreads go into the sauce, one brief boil to thicken is all they will take. Longer and they tighten from creamy to rubbery — the twenty-minute simmer belongs to the mushrooms alone.
- Puff paste shapesThese are vol-au-vent or bouchée cases, baked blind and kept warm. Frozen all-butter puff pastry cut into rounds with an inner ring scored two-thirds through does the same job. Fill at the last moment or the bases go soft.
Sweetbreads — the thymus and pancreas of a calf — were a genteel entree in nineteenth-century American households, prized for their delicacy and their expense, and they appear in Housekeeping in Old Virginia (1879), Marion Cabell Tyree's compilation of contributions from Virginia housekeepers, each signed with initials as this one is by "Mrs. R.R." The "can of French mushrooms" is the telling detail: imported tinned champignons were a status ingredient in the decades after the Civil War, when commercial canning had matured and fresh cultivated mushrooms were still scarce. Serving the mixture in puff-paste cases follows French service of the period, in which a bouchée or vol-au-vent of sweetbreads was one form the entree course could take; the terminology is simplified here to "puff paste shapes."