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Sweetbread and Cucumber Salad II
Parboil a sweetbread, adding to water a bit of bay leaf, a slice of onion, and a blade of mace. Cool, and cut in small cubes; there should be three-fourths cup. Add an equal quantity of cucumber cubes. Beat one-half cup thick cream until stiff; add one-fourth tablespoon granulated gelatine soaked in one-half tablespoon cold water and dissolved in one and one-half tablespoons boiling water, then add one and one-half tablespoons vinegar. Add sweetbread and cucumber, season highly with salt and paprika, mould, and chill. Arrange on lettuce leaves, and serve with French Dressing.
A cold moulded salad of the type Fannie Farmer's book calls a "cream salad": whipped cream stiffened with a trace of gelatine standing in for mayonnaise. Two things decide whether it works — the sweetbread must be cooked through and thoroughly cold, and the gelatine must be added to the cream while still liquid but not hot.
- Buy the right glandSweetbread here means veal thymus or pancreas, sold at butchers rather than supermarkets and often frozen. The recipe calls for one sweetbread, which should be near the three-quarters cup of cubes wanted, though yields vary with size.
- "Parboil" needs to mean cookedSoak the sweetbread in several changes of cold water, peel off the membrane, then simmer it in the seasoned water until firm all the way through — about 15 to 20 minutes for a veal pair, to an internal 160F. Offal eaten cold in a salad should not be left partly raw, and undercooked sweetbread has an unpleasant soft texture besides.
- A blade of maceOne thin shard of the lacy covering of nutmeg. If you only have ground, a pinch is close enough; it is a background note, not a feature.
- The gelatine measuresOne-fourth tablespoon is three-quarters of a teaspoon, about a third of a standard envelope. Bloom it in the half tablespoon of cold water, dissolve in the boiling water, and let it cool to barely warm before it goes into the whipped cream or it will slacken the whole thing.
- Thick creamHeavy or whipping cream at 36 per cent fat or above. Whip it stiff before adding any liquid; the vinegar and gelatine both thin it, and cream that started soft will not hold the mould.
- CucumberPeel, seed, and salt the cubes for ten minutes, then pat dry. Unsalted cucumber sheds water into the set cream and leaves a puddle in the mould.
- Moulding and chillingA small loaf pan or individual cups, rinsed with cold water, unmoulds cleanly. Give it at least four hours; with this little gelatine the set is delicate and will not survive being rushed.
- Yield and dressingAbout four small salads. The French Dressing referenced is the book's plain vinaigrette -- oil and vinegar in roughly two-to-one proportion with salt and pepper, whisked fresh, not a sweetened bottled dressing.
Sweetbreads were a genuine delicacy in American cooking around 1900, and the Boston Cooking School book gives them several treatments -- creamed, broiled, in croquettes, in patty shells. Their appearance in the salad chapter reflects the era's enthusiasm for moulded and jellied dishes, made possible by cheap granulated gelatine, which came into convenient packet form in the late nineteenth century and freed cooks from boiling calves' feet. The whipped-cream-and-gelatine base seen here is a period alternative to mayonnaise, lighter and less assertive. That such a salad was thought worth two numbered versions says something about how differently the American palate once regarded organ meats: they fell out of favour over the twentieth century, and sweetbreads are now a restaurant item most home cooks have never handled.