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Sweetbread-and-Cucumber Salad, No. 2
Cook, marinate and drain the sweetbreads as before; mix with an equal quantity of cucumber cut in dice, and then with cream dressing. Line the inner side of lettuce nests with slices of radish, one overlapping another (do not remove the pink skin from the radish). Put in a spoonful of the salad and garnish each nest with a small radish cut to resemble a flower.
A composed salad that assumes you have already read the entry before it, and that you keep sweetbreads in the house. Both assumptions need unpacking.
- "As before" means blanch, press, trimThe previous entry is not reproduced here, but the standard preparation of the period ran: soak the sweetbreads in several changes of cold water until they run pale, simmer gently in salted acidulated water, then plunge into cold water. Press between two plates under a weight until cold, then peel away the membrane and gristle and break into bite-size pieces.
- Which sweetbread to buyVeal heart (or heart-shaped) sweetbreads are firmer and hold their shape in dice; throat sweetbreads are softer and more inclined to shred. Order ahead from a butcher, and cook them within a day of purchase — they are highly perishable.
- Marinate means dressed in vinaigretteIn period salad books, to marinate is generally to toss the cooked pieces in plain French dressing (oil, vinegar, salt, pepper), let them stand a while, then drain. Skipping it leaves the sweetbreads bland under the cream dressing.
- Cream dressingUsually a cooked dressing thinned with cream, or mayonnaise lightened with a few spoonfuls of cream; some period versions do fold in whipped cream. About half a cup for two cups of combined sweetbreads and cucumber is enough; more turns the salad to soup.
- The cucumbersPeel, seed and dice, then salt lightly and drain 20 minutes before combining. Undrained cucumber weeps into the dressing within minutes of assembly. Chill everything and dress at the last moment.
- Lettuce nestsThe cupped inner leaves of iceberg or butter lettuce, trimmed to sit flat. Chill them in ice water and dry thoroughly so the radish slices adhere to the inside curve rather than sliding out.
- Radish rosesCut four or five thin petals down the sides of a trimmed radish, stopping short of the base, and leave in ice water 30 minutes for the petals to open.
- YieldAbout a pound of sweetbreads, trimmed, gives roughly two cups diced; with equal cucumber that is some four cups of salad, and at the spoonful per nest the recipe calls for it will fill considerably more than six to eight nests.
Sweetbreads — the thymus and pancreas of a calf or lamb — were a genteel luxury in American cookery from the 1870s through the 1920s, delicate enough for invalid cookery yet expensive enough for a luncheon table. Their bland, creamy texture made them a natural for the era's fashion for cold composed salads bound with mayonnaise or boiled dressing, where the cook's skill was judged as much on the arrangement as the flavor. The radish-lined lettuce nest belongs squarely to that decorative tradition, in which garnishes were carved to resemble flowers and salads were built into individual portions rather than tossed in a bowl. It is a chapter of American food history that largely ended with the shift away from offal in the mid-twentieth century.