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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Fresh Mushrooms and Sweetbreads
Soak one pair of sweetbreads in cold water; cover with boiling salted water and let boil three minutes, then simmer twenty minutes; cool, and cut in small cubes. Sauté in two tablespoonfuls of hot butter sufficient mushroom caps, peeled and broken into pieces, to make with the sweetbreads two cups and a half. Make a sauce in the blazer, using one-fourth a cup, each, of butter and flour, one cup of chicken stock and half a cup of cream; add the sweetbreads and mushrooms, one tablespoonful of lemon juice, and, if desired, the yolks of two eggs, beaten and diluted with one-fourth a
A standard chafing-dish creamed sweetbread, written for a cook who already knew how to handle offal. Two things need attention: the sweetbreads themselves, and the fact that the text breaks off mid-sentence in the middle of the egg liaison.
- The recipe is truncatedThe original ends at "diluted with one-fourth a" — the missing words are almost certainly a quarter cup of cream or stock, stirred into the beaten yolks and returned to the pan off the heat. Treat the yolk enrichment as optional, which the author already does.
- Do not let it boil after the yolks go inThis is the hinge. Once the diluted yolks are added, keep the blazer over hot water or off the flame entirely; a boil curdles the sauce into grains. It thickens at around 160-175F and needs nothing more.
- What sweetbreads areSweetbreads are the thymus (throat) and pancreas (heart) glands, not brain or spinal cord, so the standing nervous-tissue warning does not describe this cut. Buy them from a butcher you trust, use them within a day, and soak in several changes of cold water until the water runs clear.
- Peel the membraneAfter the twenty-minute simmer and cooling, strip the outer membrane and any hard tubes before cubing. Pressing the cooked sweetbreads flat under a plate and a weight for an hour makes them firmer and easier to cut.
- The blazerThe blazer is the upper pan of a chafing dish, used directly over the flame. A wide skillet or a saute pan does the same job; if you have a bain-marie or double boiler, use it for the final stage with the yolks.
- Peeling mushroomsPeriod cookbooks routinely direct that mushroom caps be peeled. Modern buttons or cremini need only a wipe.
- A very thick rouxA quarter cup each of butter and flour to a cup and a half of liquid is more flour than modern practice would use for a cream sauce. Expect something closer to a bound filling than a pouring sauce — thin with more stock if you want it looser.
- Yield and servingTwo and a half cups of solids in sauce serves about four as a light main course. Dishes of this kind were commonly served on toast points, in patty shells or in timbale cases.
Sweetbreads and mushrooms in cream was one of the standard dishes of the American chafing-dish vogue that ran from the 1890s into the 1910s, when hostesses cooked at the table for late suppers and after-theatre parties. The appeal was practical: everything in this dish is cooked in advance except the sauce, so the performance at the table takes only a few minutes and needs no kitchen. Sweetbreads appeared often on hotel and club menus, and the pairing with mushrooms and a lemon-sharpened cream sauce follows French restaurant practice of the period, where ris de veau was treated as a delicate white meat rather than as organ meat. The egg-yolk liaison, offered here as optional, is the older French method of finishing a velvety sauce.