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Sweetbread and Celery Salad
Mix equal parts of parboiled sweetbreads cut in one-half inch cubes and celery finely cut. Moisten with Cream Dressing, and arrange on lettuce leaves.
Two ingredients and a dressing, which means everything depends on how the sweetbreads are handled before they ever reach the lettuce. The book assumes you have already read its sweetbread chapter; if you have not, the word "parboiled" will mislead you.
- Cook the sweetbreads through, not partly"Parboiled" in books of this kind generally means soaked in cold water, then simmered around 20 minutes in acidulated salted water until firm and opaque to the center — effectively fully cooked. Since the salad is served cold with no further cooking, treat that simmer as the only cooking step and take the sweetbreads to 160F throughout.
- What a sweetbread isThe thymus (throat) or pancreas (heart/stomach) gland of a calf or lamb. Veal heart sweetbreads are the prized ones and the firmest for cubing. Expect to order them from a butcher; they are rarely on supermarket shelves, and they are highly perishable — use within a day of purchase.
- Soak, blanch, pressSoak in several changes of cold water for an hour or two to draw out blood, then simmer. Slip off the outer membrane and any gristle while warm, then press between two plates with a weight and chill. Pressed and thoroughly cold sweetbreads cut into clean half-inch cubes; warm ones crumble.
- Cream DressingA separate recipe in the same book: a cooked dressing thickened with egg and flour, thinned with cream and sharpened with vinegar or lemon. A modern substitute is mayonnaise loosened with a few spoonfuls of heavy cream and a squeeze of lemon. Dress lightly — the point is to coat, not to bury.
- CeleryNineteenth-century celery was blanched pale and eaten as a luxury vegetable, and was generally milder than today's dark green stalks. Use inner ribs, peel the outer ones, and cut them fine as directed so the texture reads against the soft sweetbread.
- Quantity and yieldNo amounts are given. As a rough guide, a pair of veal sweetbreads (about a pound raw) should give somewhere near 2 cups cubed; with an equal volume of celery and a few tablespoons of dressing that would serve about four as a first course.
- AssemblingMix and dress just before serving. Sweetbreads absorb dressing quickly and go pasty if they sit, and the celery weeps water into the bowl.
Sweetbreads were a fashionable dish in American dining rooms from the 1870s through the 1910s, expensive enough to signal a good table and mild enough to suit the era's taste for pale, delicate food. The book gives them a run of recipes — braised, larded, creamed, in croquettes — and this salad sits at the end of that sequence. The pairing with celery is characteristic of the period: celery was itself a prestige vegetable, grown blanched and served in tall cut-glass vases, and its crispness was the standard foil for anything soft and rich. The whole thing arranged on lettuce leaves rather than tossed in a bowl is in keeping with the turn-of-the-century taste for composed, individually served salads.