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Sweetbreads en Caisse
INGREDIENTS for entrée for 6 or 8 persons.-3 sweetbreads, 1 oz. of bacon fat chopped fine, 1 oz. of butter, 1 teaspoonful of olive oil, 2 dessertspoonfuls of chopped mushrooms, a small teaspoonful of chopped shalot, a little finely-chopped parsley, bread-crumbs, salt, pepper and grated nutmeg. AVERAGE COST, 3s. 6d.
Soak the sweetbreads in warm water for an hour, boil them 10 minutes, take them out and put them in cold water for a few minutes; then cut them into small pieces. Make a forcemeat of the other ingredients with the exception of the seasoning and parsley, and put this over the fire for 5 minutes; add to it the parsley and seasoning, and hold over the fire for 2 minutes more, then let it cool.
Butter some paper cases, lay a little forcemeat in, then some of the sweetbread, and, over that, some more forcemeat and breadcrumbs. Bake very gently for hour, then brown over the top with a salamander or before the fire.
TIME. hour to bake.
SEASONABLE. - May to August.
Sweetbreads, Sweetbreads, Fried, à la
A late-Victorian entrée: blanched sweetbreads layered with a mushroom duxelles in individual paper cases. Most of the work is in the preparation of the sweetbreads themselves, which the recipe treats as common knowledge.
- Buying sweetbreadsVeal sweetbreads (the thymus and pancreas of a calf) are meant here; weights vary a good deal, so buy by the piece rather than by the pound. Order from a butcher in advance, and use them within a day of purchase, as they spoil quickly. Lamb sweetbreads are smaller and will work if you increase the count.
- Soak, then trimThe hour in warm water draws out blood; several changes of cold water do it better. After the 10-minute blanch and the cold plunge, peel away the outer membrane and any gristle or fat before cutting the pieces, which the recipe assumes rather than states.
- Press them if you have timePressing the blanched sweetbreads flat between two plates with a weight for an hour or two is a technique often recommended for them. It firms the texture and makes them far easier to cut cleanly.
- The forcemeat is a duxellesThe forcemeat is close to a duxelles -- Bacon fat, butter, oil, mushrooms and shallot cooked down for five minutes is essentially a duxelles, here bound with some of the breadcrumbs. Cook it until the mushroom liquid has gone, or the cases will be wet; the parsley and seasoning go in at the very end.
- ShalotAn older spelling of shallot. One small teaspoonful chopped is roughly half a small shallot; the quantity is small relative to the sweetbread.
- Paper casesCaisses were stiff paper or parchment cases, either bought or folded by the cook. Buttered parchment cases, foil cases, or small buttered ramekins all serve; six to eight of about 3 in. diameter matches the stated yield.
- The baking time is garbledBoth the method and the TIME line have lost their fraction in printing, so the original figure cannot be read off the page. 'Bake very gently' indicates a low oven; the sweetbreads have only been blanched, so bake until they are hot through and cooked, not merely warmed.
- SalamanderA metal plate heated red-hot and held over the surface to brown it. A domestic broiler set high, with the cases close under it for a minute or two, does the same job; watch paper cases carefully.
- ServingA made dish for the entrée course, one case per person, served hot. As a modern first course it feeds six to eight, as the recipe states.
Sweetbreads occupied a peculiar rank in nineteenth-century English cookery: cheap enough to appear in a household manual, delicate enough to be dressed as an entrée for company, and served in the small individual cases the French called caisses, which flattered the diner with a portion of their own. The "SEASONABLE - May to August" note is the giveaway that this is pre-refrigeration writing; sweetbreads came with the spring and summer supply of veal, and the offal, being highly perishable, had to be eaten near the time and place of slaughter. The forcemeat here is a plain duxelles of mushroom and shallot, a technique generally traced to seventeenth-century French practice and long since absorbed into English kitchens. A price is given -- 3s. 6d. -- for a dish that read as expensive.