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Sweet-Bread Salad
Clean and parboil one pair of sweet-breads. Then throw them into cold water to blanch a half hour. Remove the fat and every particle of the thin skin. Then cut into thin slices with a silver knife and stand away in a cold place until wanted. When ready to serve put one goodsized slice of onion in the bottom of the salad bowl and arrange over and around it crisp lettuce leaves. On top of this arrange the sweet-breads, cover with Mayonnaise dressing, and serve.
This slice of onion gives just the faintest suspicion of onion and is a great improvement.
One dozen crabs, 2 roots of celery,
A cold composed salad from the era when sweetbreads were standard American restaurant fare. The technique is straightforward; the vagueness is all in the word "parboil."
- Cook them through, not partwayBecause this salad is served cold and never reheated, the sweetbreads must be fully cooked before they are chilled. Simmer them in salted acidulated water for 15 to 20 minutes, until firm all the way through, rather than the brief scald that "parboil" sometimes meant. Undercooked offal held cold is not a risk worth taking.
- "One pair"A pair of veal sweetbreads is roughly 1 to 1 1/2 lb and will serve four as a salad course. Lamb sweetbreads are much smaller; you would need six or eight.
- The blanching bathThe half hour in cold water is not decoration. It firms and whitens the flesh so it slices cleanly, and the thin skin comes away more easily while the sweetbreads are still damp.
- Press before slicingWeighting the cooked sweetbreads between two plates while they chill is a long-established kitchen technique, though this recipe does not ask for it; pressed sweetbreads slice into neat thin rounds instead of crumbling.
- The silver knifeA period precaution against carbon-steel blades, which discoloured pale foods and left a metallic taste. Any stainless knife does the job now.
- The onionA single good-sized slice sits in the bottom of the bowl under the lettuce and perfumes the salad only faintly. Do not substitute chopped onion, which overwhelms sweetbreads entirely.
- MayonnaisePeriod mayonnaise dressings are built on raw yolks. Use a commercial mayonnaise or a pasteurised-egg version if the salad will sit out or be served to anyone vulnerable.
- The stray line at the end"One dozen crabs, 2 roots of celery" appears to be the opening of an adjacent recipe's ingredient list, carried over in the typesetting. It has nothing to do with this dish.
Sweetbreads are the thymus and pancreas of a calf or lamb. The origin of the name is uncertain: the "bread" element is often connected to an older sense of brād meaning flesh, though this is not settled, and the force of "sweet" is likewise unclear. They were a luxury in late nineteenth-century America, appearing constantly on hotel and club menus creamed, larded, broiled, or, as here, chilled and dressed for a salad course. The instruction about the single slice of onion is the sort of detail that marks a working cook rather than a compiler, and the silver knife is a reminder that stainless steel was not yet in the domestic kitchen.