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Sweetbread-and-Cucumber Salad
ARRANGE the leaves of a head of cabbage lettuce loosely upon a serving-dish, without destroying its shape. Have ready a pair of sweetbreads cooked in salted, acidulated water twenty minutes, and cooled and cut in small cubes and marinated; also the same quantity of cucumber cut in dice, chilled in ice water and dried upon a cloth. Drain the French dressing from the sweetbread and scatter the bits of sweetbread and cucumber through the lettuce. Press three-fourths a cup of firm jelly mayonnaise through a pastry bag with small tube, in little stars, here and there. throughout the lettuce, and serve at once.
A composed salad from the era when sweetbreads were a standard luxury on American menus. Almost everything the recipe assumes you already know is in the preparation of the sweetbreads and the setting of the mayonnaise.
- Prepare the sweetbreads firstThe recipe skips the soaking. Sweetbreads should be soaked in several changes of cold water for a few hours until the water runs clear, then blanched, cooled, and stripped of the outer membrane and any tubes before they are cubed. Skipping this leaves them bloody-tasting and hard to cut cleanly.
- "Acidulated water"Water with lemon juice or vinegar added, roughly a tablespoon per quart, plus salt. It keeps the sweetbreads pale. Twenty minutes at a bare simmer is right for a calf's pair; lamb sweetbreads are smaller and need closer to twelve to fifteen minutes.
- "A pair of sweetbreads"Sweetbreads are sold in pairs because each animal yields a throat (thymus) and a heart (pancreas) portion. A pair of veal sweetbreads runs roughly 1 to 1 1/2 lb, which after trimming should give a couple of cups of cubes or thereabouts. Order them ahead; they are not a case item.
- "Marinated"Here it means tossing the cubes in French dressing (oil, vinegar, salt, pepper) and letting them stand; the recipe has them cooled and cut first. Drain them well afterwards, as the instruction to 'drain the French dressing' indicates, or the dressing will thin the mayonnaise stars.
- Jelly mayonnaiseMayonnaise stiffened with dissolved gelatin, about a teaspoon of granulated gelatin softened in cold water, dissolved over hot water, cooled to lukewarm and beaten into 3/4 cup mayonnaise. It must be chilled to the point of just setting before it will hold a piped star; too warm and it runs, too cold and it breaks in the bag.
- Raw eggHomemade mayonnaise here is never cooked and never heated in the finished salad. Use pasteurized eggs, or good commercial mayonnaise thickened with gelatin as above, if serving anyone who should avoid raw egg.
- "Cabbage lettuce"A firm heading lettuce; iceberg or a tight butterhead is the modern equivalent. The point of separating the leaves "without destroying its shape" is that the cup-shaped leaves hold the diced filling.
- Yield and timingEnough for several as a first course. Assemble at the last moment as directed: the cucumber will weep water and the piped mayonnaise will soften as it stands at room temperature.
Sweetbreads sat near the top of the American restaurant hierarchy from the 1880s through the First World War, valued for their delicacy and for the fact that they spoil quickly and so had to be bought and cooked fresh. Books of this type, aimed at the hostess with a chafing dish and a pastry bag, treat them as a natural luxury filling for salads, patties and creamed dishes. The piped stars of jellied mayonnaise are pure period style: the vogue for gelatin-set dressings that could be forced through a tube and hold their shape on a plate belongs to the same decorative impulse that produced molded aspics and ribboned creams. The name "sweetbread" has no settled explanation, though it is generally traced to an older sense of "bread" meaning a piece or morsel of flesh rather than to anything baked.