Home › Salad Dressings › Oyster-and-Sweetbread Salad
Oyster-and-Sweetbread Salad
Cut a pair of cold cooked sweetbreads into cubes.
Parboil one pint of oysters, drain, cool, and cut in halves; marinate the sweetbreads and oysters with French dressing, and allow them to stand at least half an hour; drain, mix with mayonnaise, and serve on a bed of lettuce or cress. Or, surround with a circle of chopped cucumbers seasoned with French dressing.
A late-Victorian composed salad of two luxury ingredients, both of which are cooked before they ever meet the dressing. The hinge is restraint at the stove: oysters and sweetbreads both toughen fast.
- Parboiling oystersOne to two minutes in their own liquor is all they need — lift them out the moment the edges ruffle. Anything longer and they shrink into rubber, which no amount of mayonnaise will hide.
- "A pair of sweetbreads"A pair means one animal's set, the round heart sweetbread and the longer throat sweetbread, often somewhere in the region of a pound to a pound and a half together. What butchers stock varies; about a pound of sweetbreads will serve.
- Preparing them, which the recipe assumesSoak in several changes of cold water for a few hours, blanch 3-4 minutes in acidulated water, plunge into ice water, then peel away the outer membrane and any tubes. Press between two plates under a weight until cold and firm, which makes clean cubes possible.
- A pint of oystersThat is the shucked-and-liquor measure still sold in tubs; depending on grade, roughly two to three dozen medium oysters. Drain and reserve the liquor for the parboil.
- French dressingIn this period it means a plain unemulsified vinaigrette of oil and vinegar, something like two or three parts oil to one of vinegar, with salt and pepper; some period versions also take mustard or paprika. Here it is a marinade rather than a finishing sauce.
- The marinating stepHalf an hour is a minimum, not a target; an hour in the refrigerator is better. Drain thoroughly before adding mayonnaise or the dressing will thin and slide off the lettuce.
- MayonnaiseThe book intends a hand-made mayonnaise of raw yolk, oil and vinegar. If you make your own, use pasteurized eggs and keep the salad cold, since nothing in this dish is cooked after the sauce goes in; good bottled mayonnaise thinned with a little lemon juice is a fair substitute.
- Yield and servingServes four as a first course or light lunch. Assemble at the last moment — dressed sweetbreads sitting on lettuce will wilt the leaves within a quarter of an hour.
Oysters were cheap and plentiful in late nineteenth-century America while still reading as festive at table, and sweetbreads were the other half of a standard genteel pairing: creamed in patty shells, in vol-au-vents, in croquettes, and here chilled into a salad. The combination persisted on hotel and club menus well into the twentieth century, before offal fell out of general favour.