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Sweetbread Salad
Marinate one cup each of cold cooked sweetbreads, celery and cucumbers. Chill one hour. Drain; mix with mayonnaise; serve on lettuce, and garnish with pimento.
A brief formula that assumes the cook already has cooked sweetbreads on hand and knows what "marinate" meant in 1907. Both need filling in.
- "Marinate" means dress with vinaigretteIn American cookbooks of this period, to marinate a salad ingredient is to toss it with French dressing — roughly three parts oil to one part vinegar, with salt and pepper — and let it stand. The hour of chilling is the marinating; the mayonnaise goes on only after draining.
- Sweetbreads have to be cooked firstThe recipe starts from "cold cooked sweetbreads." Standard practice is to soak them in several changes of cold water until the water runs clear, then simmer in acidulated water until firm, cool, and peel away the membrane and any tubes. They are highly perishable, so buy them fresh, keep them cold, and use within a day.
- Buying themSweetbreads are the thymus and pancreas of a young calf or lamb, and are rarely found in supermarket cases. Order from a butcher; veal sweetbreads are the ones intended here. A pair of veal sweetbreads, trimmed and diced, will usually give the cup called for or more, depending on size.
- CucumbersPeel, halve, and scrape out the seeds before dicing, then salt briefly and drain. Cucumbers of the period were often thicker-skinned and seedier than the varieties usually sold today, and the watery seed core is still what turns this salad soupy.
- PimentoCanned or jarred pimiento — a sweet red pepper packed in brine — cut into strips or points for the garnish. Roasted red pepper is the nearest substitute.
- Draining mattersPress the drained mixture gently in a sieve before adding mayonnaise. Any dressing left clinging thins the mayonnaise and it slides off the lettuce.
- YieldThree cups of dressed mixture serves four as a first course, or two as a lunch salad.
Sweetbreads were a luxury of the late Victorian and Edwardian table — delicate, pale, expensive, and served creamed, braised, breaded, or, as here, cold in salad. Their appearance in a chocolate manufacturer's promotional cookbook is a reminder of what such books were: Walter M. Lowney's company published its Cook Book (compiled by Maria Willett Howard, 1907) to sell cocoa and chocolate, but padded it out into a complete general household manual, salads and entrées included. The name has nothing to do with sugar or bread; it is generally traced to older senses of "sweet" for the mild flavor and "bread" from an Old English word for roast flesh. Recipes like this one, all assembly and no cooking, belong to the era's fashion for elaborately garnished cold salads bound with mayonnaise and set on a lettuce leaf, a style that ran through American entertaining from the 1890s well into the 1930s.