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Scrambled Eggs with Sweetbreads
4 eggs ½ teaspoon salt 1/8 teaspoon pepper 1/2 cup milk 1 sweetbread, parboiled and cut in dice 2 tablespoons butter Beat eggs slightly, using a silver folk, add salt, pepper, milk, and sweetbread. Put butter in hot chafing-dish; when melted, pour in the mixture. Cook until of creamy consistency, constantly stirring and scraping from bottom of the pan.
A chafing-dish supper dish that depends on two things: properly prepared sweetbreads and low, patient heat. Nothing here is difficult, but both steps are easy to rush.
- The salt is almost certainly a misprintThe salt is heavy -- 1½ teaspoons for four eggs is a great deal by modern taste. Start with ½ teaspoon and adjust, remembering the parboiled sweetbread will have been salted in its cooking water.
- Parboiling the sweetbread"Parboiled" here is a full preparation, not a quick dip. Soak the sweetbread in several changes of cold water for an hour or two until it whitens, simmer it 15-20 minutes in salted water with a spoonful of lemon juice or vinegar, then plunge it into cold water and peel away the outer membrane and any tubes before dicing.
- What a sweetbread isThe thymus or pancreas of a calf or lamb, not a gland most supermarkets stock. Order from a butcher; where there is a choice, the heart (pancreas) sweetbread is usually reckoned the better one and the throat (thymus) the lesser. One weighs roughly 8-12 oz before trimming, which is more than enough for four eggs.
- The chafing-dishThe recipe means the blazer pan set directly over the flame, not over the hot-water bath. On a modern range use a heavy skillet or saucepan over low heat, or the water pan if you want insurance against overcooking.
- The silver forkPeriod recipes often specify silver (or wood) for eggs, on the grounds that iron and steel could grey them or lend a metallic taste. Stainless steel and a whisk are fine now, though beating only "slightly" matters: overbeaten eggs set into curds rather than cream.
- Creamy consistencyTake the pan off the heat while the eggs still look slightly underdone and loose; residual heat in the blazer finishes them. This is the hinge of the dish, and a minute too long turns it into wet scrambled eggs with lumps of gland.
- YieldServes two generously, or three as a light supper course with toast.
Chafing-dish cookery had a genuine vogue in American cities in the 1890s and 1900s, and Fannie Farmer's book gives it a chapter of its own: a spirit lamp and a blazer pan let a hostess produce a hot dish at the table without a servant or a kitchen trip, which suited bachelor apartments, late suppers after the theatre, and the college rooms where the fashion is often said to have taken hold. Sweetbreads were the natural partner for that kind of cooking, being pale, mild, quick to reheat and considered elegant, and they turn up throughout the period creamed, in patty shells, broiled on skewers, or folded into eggs as here.