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Sweetbread à la Mont Vert
Parboil a pair of sweetbreads, and gash. Decorate in gashes with truffles cut in thin slices, and slice in fancy shapes. Melt three tablespoons butter, add two slices onion, six slices carrot, and sweetbreads; fry five minutes. Pour off butter, and add one-fourth cup brown stock and two tablespoons Sherry wine. Cook in oven twenty-five minutes, basting often until well glazed. Serve in nests of peas, and pour around Mushroom Sauce.
Nests. Drain and rinse one can peas, and rub through a sieve. Add three tablespoons butter, and salt and pepper to taste. Heat to boiling-point, and shape in nests, using pastry bag and tube.
Mushroom Sauce. Clean three large mushroom caps, cut in halves crosswise, then in slices. Sauté in two tablespoons butter five minutes. Dredge with one tablespoon flour, and add one cup cream and liquor left in pan in which sweetbreads were cooked. Cook two minutes.
A turn-of-the-century restaurant plate scaled to a home kitchen: braised veal sweetbreads glazed in the oven, set in piped pea purée. The original assumes you know how to handle sweetbreads before the first line, which is where most of the work actually lies.
- Buy and prepare the sweetbreads properly"a pair" is the butcher's term for the two sweetbreads of a single animal (the throat and the heart sweetbread), usually somewhere around 1 to 1.5 lb, and veal is almost certainly what is meant here. Soak them in several changes of cold water for a few hours until they lose their pinkness, then parboil 15-20 minutes in acidulated water, plunge into ice water, and peel away the membrane and connective tissue. Pressing between two plates with a weight for an hour helps them slice cleanly.
- "Gash" and "slice in fancy shapes"Cut shallow slits into the surface of the pressed sweetbread and insert thin truffle slices so they show as dark inlay; the fancy shapes are the truffle pieces, cut with a small cutter. Purely decorative, and the dish works without it.
- TrufflesMost likely canned black truffle, which was the usual household form and far more affordable relative to today. Thin slices of a dark mushroom, or nothing at all, are the honest substitutes; truffle oil is not.
- Oven heatNo temperature is given, as was normal in cookbooks of this date. A moderate oven, around 350F, is a reasonable modern reading for a 25-minute glaze. Baste often, as instructed: the quantity of liquid is small and will scorch rather than reduce if left alone.
- Brown stock and the mirepoixBrown stock and the aromatics -- brown stock here means a proper brown veal or beef stock, not a bouillon cube. The onion and carrot slices are aromatics for the frying stage; the recipe says only to pour off the butter, and presumably they go with it, but it does not say so outright.
- Canned peas for the nestsThe recipe calls for canned peas, which were widely available and give the soft, sievable texture the piping needs. Frozen peas cooked until quite soft work as well; pass them through a sieve or food mill rather than a blender, which makes the puree gluey. It must be stiff enough to hold a piped shape, so drive off excess moisture over heat before it goes into the bag.
- The sauce is a pan sauceDeglaze the roasting dish with the cream so the glaze goes into the sauce. One cup of cream against one tablespoon of flour gives a thin, pourable sauce; two minutes is enough to lose the raw flour taste, but simmer a little longer if it seems loose.
- YieldServes four as an entrée in the period sense of a small made dish, or two as a modern main course.
The Boston Cooking-School Cook Book carries a long run of sweetbread dishes because sweetbreads were the polite centerpiece of the American "entrée" course: mild, pale, expensive enough to signal a good table, and requiring exactly the kind of methodical multi-stage handling that Fannie Farmer's school was built to teach. The name is menu French of the sort restaurants and cooking schools invented freely in the 1890s — mont vert, green mountain, though whether that points to the piped hillocks of pea purée the sweetbread sits in or to Vermont is anyone's guess — in the same family as the era's countless dishes "à la" some place or person that had no connection to the recipe. The pastry bag and tube called for here mark the period too: piped vegetable purées were garnishing work borrowed from professional kitchens and presented to the home cook as something she could reasonably attempt.