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Sweetbread in Peppers
Parboil sweetbread, cool, and cut in small pieces; there should be one cup. Melt two tablespoons butter, add two tablespoons flour, and pour on gradually one-half cup chicken stock; then add two tablespoons heavy cream, and one-third cup mushroom caps broken in small pieces. Season with salt, paprika, and Worcestershire Sauce. Cut a slice from stem end of six peppers, remove seeds, and parboil peppers five minutes. Cool, fill, cover with buttered crumbs, and bake until crumbs are brown. Break stems of mushrooms, cover with cold water, and cook slowly twenty minutes. Melt two tablespoons butter, add a few drops onion juice, two tablespoons flour, and pour on gradually the water drained from mushroom stems, and enough chicken stock to make one cup. Add one-fourth cup heavy cream, and season with salt and paprika. Pour sauce around peppers. When parboiling peppers add one-fourth teaspoon soda to water.
A two-sauce entrée from Fannie Farmer's kitchen: a thick velouté binds the filling, a thinner mushroom-stem sauce is poured around the peppers on the plate. Nothing here is difficult, but sweetbreads need handling the book takes for granted.
- Sweetbreads, and how to buy themVeal thymus ("throat" sweetbread) and pancreas ("heart" or belly sweetbread) are both sold as sweetbreads, and sources differ on which is the finer. Order ahead from a butcher — a pound of raw sweetbread should be ample for the cup of cooked pieces called for.
- The step the book omitsSoak sweetbreads in several changes of cold water, or cold salted water, for an hour or two until they lose their pink, then parboil 15-20 minutes with a squeeze of lemon. Cool under weight, and peel away the outer membrane and any tubes before cutting — the membrane toughens in the oven.
- Peppers"Peppers" here means green bell peppers; period varieties are generally reckoned smaller than the bells sold now, so six modern ones may hold more than this filling. Use small ones, or make half again as much filling.
- Skip the sodaThe quarter teaspoon of soda in the blanching water was meant to fix the green colour. It also softens the cell walls and gives a soapy edge; alkaline water destroys vitamin C as well. Blanch in plain salted water for five minutes and accept a slightly duller green.
- OvenNo temperature is given because the crumbs are the only guide. Bake at 400F for 20-25 minutes, until the peppers are tender and the crumbs are well browned — the filling is already cooked and only needs heating through.
- Mushroom caps and stemsThe recipe uses the whole mushroom: caps go raw into the filling, stems are simmered twenty minutes to make a broth that becomes the sauce liquid. No total weight is given; buy enough that the third of a cup of broken caps and the stems for the broth come from the same mushrooms.
- Onion juiceGrate a peeled onion on a fine grater and use the liquid that collects, or press a slice in a garlic press. A few drops is right; more will dominate the sweetbread.
- Worcestershire and paprikaPaprika here means a mild, sweet paprika rather than a hot one, used as much for colour as flavour. Season the filling assertively — sweetbread is mild and the pepper shell is sweet.
- YieldSix stuffed peppers, one per person as a lunch or supper entrée. Both sauces are best made the same day; the flour-thickened filling stiffens badly when chilled.
Sweetbreads sat near the top of the American genteel table around 1900 — delicate, expensive, easy to digest, and therefore recommended for invalids and for ladies' luncheons alike. Fannie Farmer's Boston Cooking-School Cook Book gives them a long run of entrées: creamed, in croustades, with mushrooms, in timbales, and here stuffed into peppers. The green pepper as an edible container was a fashionable device of the period. The instruction to add soda to the blanching water belongs to the same era's confidence in kitchen chemistry, and later fell out of use.