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Sweetbreads and Chicken in Fontage Cups
Substitute one half cup cold cooked chicken cut in small pieces for the one half cup of mushrooms, and proceed as for Sweetbreads and Mushrooms in Fontage Cups.
Creamed Oysters and Celery in Fontage Cups 1 pint oysters 2 tablespoons butter 1 tablespoon lemon juice 2 tablespoons flour 2 eggs cup cream salt and pepper 2 tablespoons wine 1 cup chopped celery Melt butter, add oysters and cook one minute. Remove oysters, add remaining ingredients except wine, cook until thick, add oysters and wine, and serve in fontage cups.
Two short entrée recipes run together here, both built on the same conceit: a rich creamed filling served in a crisp fried pastry shell. The chicken version is only a note directing you back to the sweetbread-and-mushroom recipe on the preceding page, so read them as a pair.
- The hinge: do not boil the sauceTwo eggs go into a small quantity of cream and oyster liquor. Once they are in, hold the pan below a simmer and stir constantly, or the sauce will curdle into sweet scrambled egg. Temper the beaten eggs with a ladle of the hot liquid before they go in.
- Fontage cupsThese are thin batter shells fried on a heated fontage or rosette iron dipped into batter and lowered into deep fat, the same tool sold today as a rosette iron. Timbale cases, small vol-au-vent shells, or baked phyllo cups stand in perfectly well.
- The missing cream measureThe quantity before "cup cream" has dropped out of the text. Given a pint of oysters and 2 tablespoons of flour, something in the region of half a cup to a cup is plausible, but the original figure is genuinely lost and worth judging by eye as the sauce thickens.
- A pint of oystersThat is shucked oysters with their liquor, roughly a pound; the count varies a good deal with size, from about two dozen upward. Save every drop of the liquor; apart from a spoonful each of lemon juice and wine, it and the cream are the liquid in the sauce.
- One minute means one minuteThe instruction to cook the oysters briefly, lift them out, and return them only at the end is the whole technique. Oysters held in a hot sauce for even a few extra minutes shrink and turn rubbery.
- The wineAn unspecified 'wine' in an entree of this kind was most often sherry or Madeira. The recipe adds it at the very end, with the oysters, just before serving. Two tablespoons is a seasoning, not a braising liquid.
- Sweetbreads, for the companion recipeSweetbreads are glands of the calf, the thymus of the throat and the pancreas, and generally have to be ordered from a butcher. They are soaked in cold water, blanched in acidulated water, cooled, and the membrane peeled away before being cut up; the original assumes the cook already knows this.
- YieldThe oyster filling should fill roughly six to eight small cups as a first course, or fewer as a light lunch dish; the original gives no yield.
Lowney's Cook Book (1907), compiled by Maria Willett Howard for the Walter M. Lowney chocolate company, belongs to the Boston Cooking School tradition, and this pair of entrées shows that tradition at its most characteristic: a modest amount of expensive protein stretched with cream sauce and presented in an edible container. Fontage cups are often said to take their name from the iron used to make them, a long-handled mould heated in deep fat then dipped in thin batter, though the direction of borrowing is uncertain and the iron may equally be named for the cups; either way they were part of a broader early-century fashion for serving creamed mixtures in cases rather than on plates, alongside timbales, patty shells, and bread croustades. Oysters were still cheap and abundant on the American East Coast at this date, which is why a pint of them appears in a small entrée without comment; sweetbreads, by contrast, were a genteel luxury, and the instruction that chicken may simply be substituted for the mushrooms tells you how flexibly these dishes were meant to be treated by a household working from what it had.