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Sweetbreads and Mushrooms in Fontage Cups
2 cups cooked sweetbreads ½ cup mushrooms 1 tablespoon oil tablespoon vinegar 2 tablespoons butter 3 tablespoons flour ½ cup cream salt, pepper, cayenne Melt butter; add flour, seasonings and cream; cook five minutes. Cover sweetbreads and mushrooms with oil and vinegar, and let stand twenty minutes, drain, add to sauce, reheat, and serve in fontage cups.
A short-order entrée from the era when sweetbreads were standard restaurant fare and fried batter shells were a pantry staple. Almost all the work is in the two things the recipe assumes you have already done: cooking the sweetbreads and making the cups.
- Sweetbreads are not oven-readyThe recipe begins with 2 cups already cooked. That means soaking veal sweetbreads in several changes of cold water for a few hours until they pale, simmering them 15-20 minutes in acidulated water, plunging them into ice water, then peeling away the membrane and pressing them under a weighted plate before breaking them into pieces. Buy about 1 to 1.25 lb raw to end up with 2 cups trimmed.
- Fontage cupsAlso called timbale cups, and made with the same family of tools as rosette irons: the iron on a long handle is heated in deep fat, dipped in a thin egg-and-milk batter, and returned to the fat until the crisp shell slips off. Rosette and timbale irons are still sold. Puff pastry vol-au-vent shells or small toast cases are the practical substitute, and the filling suffers nothing for it.
- The sauce is deliberately stiffThree tablespoons flour to half a cup cream gives a paste, not a sauce, which suits a filling that has to sit in a fragile shell without soaking through. If you are serving it in pastry or on toast, thin it with a few tablespoons of milk or stock; if you are using fried cups, leave it thick and fill them at the last second.
- Cook the flour outThe five minutes is not padding. A roux sauce this dense tastes of raw flour if hurried; stir it and keep it below a simmer.
- The oil and vinegar stepA twenty-minute oil-and-vinegar steep, in effect a French dressing, to sharpen the very mild sweetbreads before they go into a rich cream sauce. Drain thoroughly, or the drained dressing will thin the sauce.
- MushroomsThe recipe does not say what form; canned mushrooms were widely used at this date. Use half a cup of fresh mushrooms sauteed in butter until their water has gone, then marinate them with the sweetbreads.
- CayenneThe recipe gives no quantity. A pinch, no more, and taste before adding a second.
- YieldNo yield is given; two cups of filling will serve about four as an entrée course, or six to eight in small cups as a first course. Reheat gently and serve immediately, since the filling stiffens further as it cools.
Lowney's Cook Book was compiled by Maria Willett Howard and published in 1907 by the Walter M. Lowney Company, the Boston chocolate manufacturer, and its confectionery chapters run a good deal longer than its meat chapters. This dish belongs to the entrée in the older sense: not the main course but a small made dish served between the fish and the roast, judged by delicacy rather than size. Sweetbreads, the thymus and pancreas of a calf, were the archetypal entrée meat in American and English cooking from the 1880s through the 1920s, mild enough to carry a cream sauce and expensive enough to signal a proper dinner. The fontage or timbale iron that gives the cups their name was a common piece of kit in a well-equipped kitchen of the period, sold alongside patty pans and rosette irons; the fashion for serving creamed mixtures in an edible container of some kind ran through decades of American cookbooks before pastry shells and, later, toast points took over.