Important: Safety Warning
This recipe calls for animal brains or related nervous-system tissue. Cattle brain and spinal tissue can transmit bovine spongiform encephalopathy (BSE), the cause of variant Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease in humans, which is fatal and has no treatment.
This information has been left in for historical purposes but should not be acted upon.
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Sweetbreads with Bacon
Cut cooked sweetbreads in inch pieces. Sprinkle with salt, cayenne, lemon juice and onion juice. Wrap in slices of bacon. Skewer, sauté in butter. Serve with brown sauce, and garnish with finely chopped celery.
Calves' Brains à la Béchamel Cut two cups cooked brains in small pieces. Marinate with French dressing. Melt two tablespoons butter; add four tablespoons chopped peppers, one half cup chopped mushrooms, few drops onion juice, two tablespoons flour, and one cup chicken stock. Cook five minutes; add brains; season with salt, cayenne, Tabasco and Worcestershire.
Two dishes share this page, and they are not the same organ. The first is a straightforward chafing-dish sauté; the second calls for calves' brains, which is why the warning above stands.
- The brains are the problem, not the sweetbreadsSweetbreads are the thymus and pancreas of a young animal — glandular, not nervous, tissue. Calves' brains are central nervous system tissue, the category most strongly associated with BSE transmission, and in the US, EU and UK the brain and spinal cord of cattle over a specified age are classed as specified risk material and banned from the food supply outright.
- Why age does not settle itThe book assumes veal, and younger cattle carry lower measured risk; regulators responded by classing brain and spinal cord from cattle above a set age as specified risk material and barring it from human food, rather than by setting any domestic-kitchen threshold. No ordinary cooking temperature or time inactivates the prion involved. If you want a creamed offal dish in this style, use a current recipe built on something else.
- "Cooked sweetbreads" is doing a lot of workBoth recipes begin with the organ already cooked, and the book expects the reader to know the drill: soaking in several changes of cold water, blanching, then pressing under a weight until firm enough to slice. None of that appears here.
- Brown sauceIn a book of this period this means espagnole — a brown roux let down with beef stock and simmered down, not a bottled condiment. A modern jus or reduced demi-glace fills the same role.
- French dressingOil and vinegar with salt and pepper, roughly three to one. It is used here as a short marinade for flavour, not as a salad dressing.
- Onion juiceGrated onion pressed through a sieve, or the liquid squeezed from a cut half. It was the standard way to get onion flavour without visible pieces in a pale sauce.
- Chafing dish scaleDishes of this type were small supper dishes cooked at the table over a spirit lamp, where the heat is low and uneven, which is why the organ reaches the pan already cooked. The page gives no yield and does not itself specify a chafing dish.
- Cayenne, Tabasco and Worcestershire togetherNot redundancy — cayenne for dry heat, Tabasco for vinegar sharpness, Worcestershire for anchovy and tamarind depth. The period liked layered seasoning in bland-tasting creamed dishes.
Chafing-dish cookery was a genuine craze in American cities from the 1890s into the 1910s: a spirit lamp, a copper pan and a hostess who could cook in front of her guests without a servant in the room. Whole books were devoted to it, and Lowney's — a chocolate company's promotional cookbook — belonged to the same moment, since the dishes suited late suppers after the theatre. Offal belonged there because it was quick to cook, and because a well-off household of the period ate every part of the animal without embarrassment. Sweetbreads in particular were considered a delicacy rather than economy food, and were often paired, as here, with bacon to supply the fat and salt that the gland itself lacks. Brains, treated à la béchamel or in black butter, were a standard French preparation that American cookbooks copied wholesale, though brain recipes had faded from American books well before BSE was identified in British cattle in 1986.