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Sweetbread and Cucumber Salad
Mix two cups sweetbreads and two cups cucumbers cut in small pieces, with mayonnaise dressing; add one teaspoon gelatine, which has been dissolved in water. Press in timbale molds. Chill; remove from molds, and serve in individual nests of lettuce. Garnish with mayonnaise dressing and chopped parsley.
A short recipe that assumes a great deal of knowledge on the cook's part — chiefly that the sweetbreads have already been soaked, blanched and trimmed before they reach this page. Everything else is assembly.
- The sweetbreads are not rawPeriod cookbooks treat "sweetbreads" in a salad as a prepared ingredient. They must first be soaked in cold water until they run pale, blanched in acidulated water for about 15-20 minutes, plunged into ice water, then peeled of membrane and pressed under a weight. Two cups diced is very roughly the yield of about a pound of veal sweetbreads before trimming, though trim loss varies a good deal.
- The gelatine is underdosedOne teaspoon of granulated gelatine will not set four cups of chunky salad; it is here only to make the moulds hold their shape long enough to be turned out. Expect a barely bound mixture. If you want a clean unmoulding, bloom the gelatine in a tablespoon or two of cold water, melt it gently, and let it cool to lukewarm before stirring in — added hot it will thin the mayonnaise, added cold it will string.
- Cucumbers weepDiced cucumber releases a surprising amount of water into a mayonnaise, which is what will loosen the mould overnight. Salt the dice lightly, drain 20-30 minutes, and pat dry before mixing. Seeding them helps as much as anything.
- Timbale moldsSmall straight-sided or slightly tapered dariole moulds of about 4-6 fl oz. Ramekins, teacups or muffin tins stand in perfectly well. Rinse them in cold water rather than oiling, and dip briefly in warm water to release.
- MayonnaiseLowney's-era mayonnaise is a thick hand-beaten emulsion, stiffer than most jarred product. A commercial mayonnaise will work but gives a wetter mix; if you make your own with raw yolks, keep the salad refrigerated and eat it the day it is made.
- ChillingAllow at least three to four hours in the refrigerator. This is a salad that will not survive a warm buffet table — sweetbreads are perishable and the binding is fragile.
- YieldFour cups of mixture fills six small timbales, or four generous ones. Served on lettuce as written it is a luncheon course rather than a side.
Sweetbreads — the thymus and pancreas of a calf or lamb — were a genteel luxury in American cooking around 1900, expensive enough to signal a good table but mild enough to be treated like chicken breast. Bound with mayonnaise, moulded, turned out and set in a nest of lettuce, they belong to the same fashion for the shaped, chilled salad that produced aspics, jellied chicken and the whole timbale repertoire; the moulding was the point, and the gelatine here does almost nothing else. Lowney's Cook Book (1907) is a chocolate manufacturer's promotional volume, and as was often the case with such books it carried a full general recipe collection alongside the confectionery to establish itself as a household reference rather than an advertisement. The dish reads oddly now mainly because offal has left the middle-class supper table, not because it was ever unusual — sweetbread salad seems to have been a familiar enough sight in American cookbooks of the decade.