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Sweetbreads and Tomato Salad
1 lb. sweetbreads. 6 tomatoes.
Cook and dice sweetbreads, cut off the tops of tomatoes and with a sharp knife carefully remove hearts and dice in pieces about the size of sweetbreads. Blend with cooked dressing and fill the tomato cups. Serve on lettuce leaves. Chicken may be used instead of sweetbread.
A composed salad of the sort that filled the luncheon pages of American cookbooks around 1920. The recipe assumes you already know how to handle sweetbreads and what a cooked dressing is; neither assumption holds now.
- Sweetbreads need prep the recipe skips"Cook and dice" stands in for soaking in several changes of cold water for a few hours to draw out blood, then a gentle poach in salted acidulated water for about 15-20 minutes, then cooling under a weight and peeling away the outer membrane and any hard connective tissue. Skipping the soak and the peel gives you a grey, chewy result.
- What you are buyingSweetbreads are the thymus and pancreas of a calf or lamb; the name has nothing obvious to do with sweetness. The heart or belly sweetbread (the pancreas) is the plump, even one worth the money; the throat sweetbread (the thymus) is stringier. Order them ahead from a butcher and use them within a day.
- Poach, do not boilThe hinge of the dish. A hard boil makes sweetbreads rubbery and causes them to shed their shape; keep the water at a bare shiver, barely bubbling, and pull them while still tender.
- "Cooked dressing"This means boiled dressing: egg yolks, a little flour or cornstarch, vinegar, mustard, sugar and milk or cream, thickened over hot water. It is tarter and thinner than mayonnaise; cookbooks of the period usually give the formula in their salad chapters. Mayonnaise, or a mustardy mayonnaise thinned with cream, is the usual modern substitute.
- The tomato cupsSalt the hollowed shells and invert them on a rack for 15 minutes so they drain, or the dressing will slacken into pink liquid in the bottom of the cup. Chill the shells and the filling separately and combine just before serving.
- Diced tomato heartsSeed the diced flesh you scoop out rather than using it wet; the jelly and seeds carry most of the water.
- YieldSix filled tomatoes, one per person, as a lunch or first course. Expect to lose a fair amount of the pound in trimming and peeling.
- The chicken versionAbout 2 cups of diced poached chicken breast replaces the sweetbreads directly. Poach it, cool it in its liquid, then dice.
Sweetbreads were a genteel, expensive meat in the American kitchen of the 1910s and 1920s, served creamed, in patty shells, or as here in cold salads for ladies' luncheons; the stuffed tomato cup on a lettuce leaf was the standard vehicle of that era, appearing in hotel menus and household books alike. Mrs. Mary A. Wilson is often associated with the era's newspaper writing on wartime substitution and economy, and the closing line offering chicken instead may reflect that outlook: the structure of the dish matters more than the luxury ingredient. The "cooked dressing" she calls for was the older American salad sauce, a stovetop custard of egg and vinegar that predates commercial mayonnaise and survived in home kitchens well into the twentieth century.