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Maitre d'Hotel (INGREDIENTS for goodsized entr)
INGREDIENTS for goodsized entrée.-3 sweetbreads, egg and breadcrumbs, 1/4 lb. of butter, salt and pepper to taste, rather more than 1/2 pint of maîtred'hôtel sauce. AVERAGE COST, 4s. Soak the sweetbreads in warm water for an hour; then boil them for 10 minutes; cut them in slices, egg-and-bread-crumb them, season with pepper and salt, and put them into a frying-pan with the above proportion of butter. Keep turning them until done, which will be in about 10 minutes; dish them, and pour over them maître-d'hôtel sauce. The dish may be garnished with slices of cut lemon.
TIME. To soak 1 hour, to be boiled 10 minutes, to be fried about 10 minutes.
SEASONABLE. -In full season from May to August.
Note. - The egg and bread-crumb may be omitted, and the slices of sweetbread dredged with a little flour instead, and a good gravy may be substituted for the maître-d'hôtel sauce. This is a very simple method of dressing them.
SWEETBREADS, STEWED.
A straightforward treatment of veal sweetbreads: soaked, blanched, sliced, crumbed and fried in butter, finished with a parsley-butter sauce. Most of the work is in the preparation, which the original skates over.
- The sauce quantityThe printed page was checked: the recipe calls for rather more than half a pint of maître-d'hôtel sauce, about 10 fl oz or 300 ml, as our text now gives. That is a generous amount for three sliced sweetbreads, so pour what you need and keep the rest warm.
- Maître d'hôtel sauceIn Beeton this is a butter sauce, not the compound butter pat sold under the same name today: butter worked with chopped parsley, lemon juice, salt and pepper, either melted down with a little stock or thickened into a light velouté. Either reading works here; keep it barely warm so it does not split.
- Soak cold, not warmThe hour in warm water is there to draw out blood and firm the flesh. Use cold water, changed two or three times, or leave them in the refrigerator in lightly salted water — an hour at blood heat is exactly the condition offal spoils in.
- Blanch, refresh, pressAfter the 10-minute boil, drop the sweetbreads into iced water. Then peel away the loose outer membrane and any gristle, lay them between two plates with a weight on top, and chill for an hour. Beeton omits the pressing, but without it the slices fall apart in the pan.
- Which sweetbreadsVeal sweetbreads come in two kinds: the round, solid heart-shaped one (thymus/pancreas, depending on the butcher's usage) and the ragged throat sweetbread. The round ones slice cleanly and are worth ordering specifically. Three of them will vary a good deal in weight depending on size.
- Butter and heatA quarter-pound of butter over 10 minutes will brown and speck unless you clarify it or add a spoonful of neutral oil. Medium heat, turning once or twice; the crumb should be deep gold, and the interior is already cooked from the blanching.
- Seasonable May to AugustBeeton gives the season but no reason for it; it most likely reflects when calves came to market rather than any change in the meat itself. Sweetbreads are now available frozen year round, and frozen ones behave well provided they are thawed slowly in the refrigerator.
- Yield and the noteThe recipe says only that three sweetbreads make a good-sized entree; in modern portions that is roughly a small main for a few people, and rather more when served as one course among many. The alternative given in the note -- flour instead of egg and crumbs, gravy instead of the butter sauce -- makes a lighter, plainer dish and is the better route if the sauce worries you.
Sweetbreads occupied an odd place in Victorian cookery: costed here at four shillings, and delicate enough to appear as an entree at a dinner where the fish and the joint did the heavy work. The entree in that scheme was a made dish served between the fish and the roast, and offal that could be sliced, crumbed and sauced fitted the slot perfectly. The name attached to this page belongs to the sauce rather than the meat -- maitre d'hotel butter, parsley and lemon worked into butter, is generally traced to French cookery, though the story that it is named for the household steward expected to produce something quickly at table is traditional rather than documented. English books absorbed it wholesale, and by Beeton's day "with maitre d'hotel sauce" was shorthand for the plainest respectable French finish available to a middle-class kitchen. The near-disappearance of sweetbreads from British and American home cooking is a twentieth-century development, usually attributed to changed butchery and a general retreat from organ meats rather than to any decline in the ingredient itself.