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Creamed Sweetbread and Chicken
Reheat equal parts of cold cooked chicken, and sweetbread cut in dice, in White Sauce II.
A two-line assembly recipe that assumes you have already read the rest of the book: cold roast chicken, cooked sweetbreads and a made sauce are all treated as things standing ready in the larder. The points below fill in what the original leaves unsaid.
- What a sweetbread isThe thymus (throat) or pancreas (heart) gland of a calf, not a bread and not sweet. Heart sweetbreads are the plumper, rounder, more prized ones. Order them from a butcher; they are rarely on supermarket shelves.
- "Cooked sweetbread" means several stepsThe standard period preparation is to soak them in cold water until white, parboil in acidulated water for about twenty minutes, then plunge them into cold water and peel off the membrane and tubes. Pressing under a weighted plate while cooling, a step given for some sweetbread dishes rather than all, firms them enough to dice cleanly.
- White Sauce IIFarmer's white sauces are graduated from thin to thick by increasing butter and flour against one cup of milk. Check the book's own White Sauce entry for the proportions of No. II rather than guessing, as the numbering and quantities differ between editions.
- Reheat, do not cookThe hinge of the dish. Both meats are already cooked; hold the sauce below a simmer and give the dice five minutes at most. Boiling shreds the chicken and turns the sweetbread grainy.
- Dice sizeThe recipe says only "cut in dice"; pieces of about half an inch are a sensible size for the sauce to coat.
- SeasoningThe seasoning is assumed to be in the sauce itself: salt and pepper. A squeeze of lemon or a spoonful of sherry at the end keeps the richness in check, and sliced sauteed mushrooms are a common period addition.
- Yield and servingThe original gives no quantities; equal weights of chicken and sweetbread with enough sauce to bind is all it specifies. Serve in puff-paste patty shells or timbale cases, over toast points, or from a chafing dish.
Creamed sweetbread and chicken was a fixture of American company cooking from the 1880s through the 1920s: it appears at luncheons, wedding breakfasts, church suppers and club dinners, usually spooned into pastry shells so it could be eaten with a fork while seated at a crowded table. Sweetbreads were expensive and perishable, which is exactly why they carried social weight, and stretching them with an equal quantity of cold chicken made them go further. Its brevity is characteristic of what appears to be Fannie Farmer's method in the Boston Cooking-School Cook Book, where a numbered master sauce and a separate entry on preparing sweetbreads do the real work and the dish itself needs only a sentence. The chafing dish, popular in middle-class dining rooms, made such reheated creamed mixtures a genre of their own.