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Sweetbread à la Poulette
Reheat sweetbread, cut in cubes, in one cup Béchamel Sauce.
Sweetbreads, Country Style Parboil sweetbreads, sprinkle with salt and pepper, and dredge with flour. Arrange in baking-dish, brush over with melted butter, allowing two tablespoons to each pair of sweetbreads, and cover with thin slices fat salt pork. Bake in a hot oven over twenty-five minutes, basting twice during the cooking, and remove pork during the last five minutes of the cooking.
Two short preparations run together here, both assuming you already know Farmer's standing instructions for sweetbreads earlier in the book. Neither will work unless the glands are soaked and parboiled first.
- The step that is only impliedFarmer gives standing directions for sweetbreads elsewhere in the book: soak in cold water for about an hour, parboil roughly twenty minutes in salted water with a little lemon juice or vinegar, then plunge into cold water. Skip the soak and parboil and the membrane will not peel and the texture stays spongy.
- What a sweetbread isThe thymus (throat) and pancreas (heart or belly) glands of a milk-fed calf, sold as a pair. Heart sweetbreads are the rounder, better ones. They are highly perishable — buy them fresh, keep them very cold, and cook within a day.
- Peel and pressAfter parboiling, pull away the fat and the tough outer membrane while the glands are still warm. For the country-style version, pressing them between two plates under a weight for an hour gives even slices and a firmer bite.
- Hot ovenA period 'hot oven' runs roughly 400-450F. Twenty-five minutes at that heat suits a pressed, parboiled pair; the text's "over twenty-five minutes" may be a misprint for "about," but that is a guess.
- Fat salt porkBarding fat, cut in sheets thin enough to see light through. Unsmoked pancetta or thick-sliced fatty bacon substitutes; if using smoked bacon, expect the smoke to dominate. Removing it for the last five minutes is what browns the surface, so do not leave it out.
- À la poulette, sort ofA la poulette, sort of -- Classically poulette is a veloute finished with egg yolk and lemon. Farmer's version simply reheats the cubes in a cup of her Bechamel. A squeeze of lemon at the end brings it closer to the name.
- Reheating, not cookingIn the poulette version the sweetbreads are already cooked through from parboiling. Warm them in the sauce over low heat for a few minutes; a hard simmer toughens them and breaks the sauce.
- YieldOne pair of sweetbreads, roughly ¾ to 1 lb, serves two as a main course or four as a first course. One cup of Béchamel is right for a single pair.
Sweetbreads were a fixture of genteel American cookery in the 1890s: mild, pale, expensive, and easy to chew, which made them equally suited to a ladies' luncheon and a sickroom tray. À la poulette is generally explained as "in the manner of the poultry-woman," the classical sauce being a velout he enriched with egg yolk and sharpened with lemon, though Farmer, writing for home cooks with a limited sauce repertoire, substitutes the Béchamel she has already taught. The second recipe, "Country Style," is the American counterweight: no sauce at all, just salt pork laid over the top, which is the same barding logic that produced salt pork on roasting fowl and on cod. That the two sit side by side on one page is a fair picture of the Boston Cooking School's project — French technique and New England thrift taught in the same breath.