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Tomato-and-Sweetbread Salad
Cook two sweetbreads as directed on another page, or braise with vegetables. Cool between two plates bearing a weight. When cold cut into slices and stamp into rounds of suitable size to use with slices of tomato. Cover the slices of sweet-
A composed salad of two ingredients that no longer sit in the same aisle: sweetbreads, which now need ordering ahead, and tomatoes, which need to be good. The text breaks off mid-sentence at "Cover the slices of sweet-", so the dressing and assembly have to be inferred from the section it sits in.
- The recipe is incompleteThe page ends in the middle of the instruction to cover the sweetbread rounds, presumably with a dressing of some kind. A reasonable reconstruction: alternate rounds of sweetbread and tomato, mask with mayonnaise or a boiled dressing, and serve on lettuce.
- What a sweetbread isThe thymus (throat) or pancreas (heart or belly) of a calf or lamb, not a gland any supermarket keeps in the case. Order from a butcher; veal heart sweetbreads are the plump, even-textured ones worth slicing into rounds. Figure roughly 1 lb for two.
- Soak and blanch firstThe cross-referenced page is not reproduced here, but the conventional preparation is: soak 2-3 hours in several changes of cold water until they whiten, then simmer gently 15-20 minutes in acidulated water, cool, and peel away the outer membrane and any veiny bits. Skipping the soak leaves them grey and bloody.
- Cook them throughSweetbreads are offal and should be brought fully to temperature — simmered until firm and opaque all the way through, not left pink at the center. They are then chilled for the salad, so all the cooking happens up front.
- Pressing mattersCooling between two plates under a weight is the hinge of the recipe. It compacts the loose lobes into a solid slab you can slice cleanly and stamp with a cutter; unpressed sweetbreads crumble the moment the cutter goes in. Weight them in the refrigerator for at least 2 hours, preferably overnight.
- Handle the tomatoesCut thick slices from firm tomatoes, salt them lightly, and drain on a rack or paper for 10 minutes before assembling. Otherwise the water they shed thins the dressing and slides the stack apart.
- "Braise with vegetables"The alternative to poaching: after blanching and peeling, brown lightly and cook covered with carrot, onion and a little stock over low heat or in a slow oven until tender, 30-40 minutes. Cool and press as above.
- YieldDepending on the size of the cutter, two sweetbreads should give enough rounds for about four salad plates.
Sweetbreads were a mark of a good table in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries — expensive, delicate, and served creamed, broiled, in patty shells, and, as here, cold in salad. Janet McKenzie Hill's Salads, Sandwiches and Chafing-Dish Dainties belongs to the era when American cookery schools were teaching the composed salad as a serious course rather than an afterthought, and the stamped round is a signature of that style: ingredients cut to uniform shapes, layered, and masked with mayonnaise so the plate looked deliberate.