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Sweetbread Rissoles
Use one half rule for Chicken Rissoles. Add one cup sweetbreads cooked and cut in pieces, and one fourth cup chopped pimentoes.
A variation rather than a standalone recipe: it assumes you have the book's Chicken Rissoles in front of you and are scaling it down. The two things that need attention are the sweetbreads, which are a day's project on their own, and the binding, which must be cold and stiff before you shape anything.
- "One half rule""Rule" is the period word for recipe, so this means half a batch of the Chicken Rissoles mixture. The additions are given as flat amounts rather than halved, though without the base rule in front of you their proportion to the whole cannot be judged.
- SweetbreadsThe thymus or pancreas of a calf or lamb, sold by butchers on order rather than kept in supermarket cases. They are highly perishable; use within a day of purchase, and buy pale, plump ones.
- Preparing them, since the recipe assumes you knowSoak in several changes of cold water for a few hours, blanch in simmering salted water with a little lemon or vinegar for 15-20 minutes, then cool, peel away the outer membrane and any tubes, and press between two plates under a weight before dicing. "Cooked and cut in pieces" is doing a lot of work in that sentence.
- PimentoesCanned or jarred sweet red peppers, roasted and peeled. Drain and blot them dry; the packing liquid will loosen a stiff binding sauce and the rissoles will burst in the fat.
- The hinge: chill hardWhatever the base recipe, the bound mixture must be spread out and refrigerated until firm, at least two hours, before it is shaped or enclosed. Warm filling is the reason croquettes and rissoles fall apart.
- Rissole versus croquetteIn books of this period a rissole is usually the seasoned mixture enclosed in a round of pastry, sealed, and fried, while a croquette is crumbed. Follow whichever form the Chicken Rissoles recipe specifies.
- FryingDeep fat, hot enough to brown a bread cube quickly; about 375F on a modern thermometer. Fry a few pieces at a time so the temperature holds. The filling is already cooked, so you are only browning the crust: two to three minutes, then drain on paper.
Sweetbreads were a fixture of fashionable American menus around 1900, valued for their mildness and creamy texture and priced accordingly; they turn up constantly in the entree chapters of turn-of-the-century cookbooks, creamed, larded, broiled on skewers, or, as here, stretched with a sauce-bound mixture and fried. The chopped pimento is the era's characteristic flash of color; canned Spanish sweet peppers were an increasingly common item in American pantries around this date, though claims about exactly when they became cheap and general are hard to pin down. Lowney's Cook Book was issued by the Walter M. Lowney Company of Boston, a chocolate manufacturer, and pairs promotional confectionery chapters with a full general cookery course; the terse cross-referencing style here, building one entree out of the "rule" for another, saved space.