Important: Safety Warning
This recipe calls for animal brains or related nervous-system tissue. Cattle brain and spinal tissue can transmit bovine spongiform encephalopathy (BSE), the cause of variant Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease in humans, which is fatal and has no treatment.
This information has been left in for historical purposes but should not be acted upon.
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Sweetbreads à la Napoli
Parboil a large sweetbread and cut in eight pieces. Cook in hot frying-pan with a small quantity of butter, adding enough beef extract to give sweetbread a glazed appearance. Cut bread in slices, shape with a circular cutter three and one-half inches in diameter, and toast. Spread each piece with two tablespoons grated Parmesan cheese seasoned with salt and paprika and moistened with two tablespoons heavy cream. Arrange one piece of sweetbread on each piece of toast and season with salt and pepper. Put in individual glass-covered dishes, having two tablespoons cream in each dish. Cover each piece of sweetbread with sautéd mushroom cap, put on glass covers, and bake in a moderate oven eight minutes.
Braised Sweetbreads Eugénie Parboil a sweetbread in Sherry wine twelve minutes.
Drain, cool, cut in four pieces, and lard. Cook in fryingpan same as Sweetbreads à la Napoli. Peel mushroom caps, cover with Sherry wine, let stand one hour, drain, and sauté in butter. Arrange on circular pieces of toast, over each of which has been poured one teaspoon wine drained from mushroom caps, and season with salt and pepper. Pile five or six mushroom caps on each piece of sweetbread, add two tablespoons heavy cream, and bake in a moderate oven, eight minutes. Cook in individual glass-covered dishes.
Sweetbread Cutlets with Asparagus Tips Parboil a sweetbread, split, and cut in pieces shaped like a small cutlet, or cut in circular pieces. Sprinkle with salt and pepper, dip in crumbs, egg, and crumbs, and sauté in butter. Arrange in a circle around Creamed Asparagus Tips.
Three related sweetbread preparations, all built on the same method: parboil, glaze in a pan with butter and beef extract, then finish briefly in individual covered dishes. A note on the warning attached to this page, and then the practical matters.
- Sweetbreads are not brainsThe safety notice printed above appears to have been applied in error. Sweetbreads are the thymus (throat sweetbread) and pancreas (heart or stomach sweetbread) of a calf or lamb, not nervous tissue. Brain and spinal cord from cattle are controlled as specified risk material in the US, UK and EU; thymus and pancreas are not, and veal sweetbreads are sold legally by butchers today.
- Preparation the recipe assumes"Parboil a large sweetbread" leaves out the soaking and pressing that period cookbooks generally set out separately, under their general directions for sweetbreads. Soak in several changes of cold water until the water runs clear, blanch, cool in ice water, then peel away the outer membrane and any fat and gristle. Pressing between two plates under a weight for an hour firms the lobes so they slice cleanly.
- A moderate ovenConventionally reckoned at about 350F, though the book itself gives no temperatures. Eight minutes at that heat is simply to warm the assembly through and set the cream — the sweetbread is already cooked from the parboil and the pan glaze.
- Beef extractA concentrated meat paste such as Bovril, Liebig's or a modern equivalent like Better Than Bouillon. Half a teaspoon dissolved in the pan butter is plenty; it is there for the mahogany glaze, not for a broth. Undiluted extract is very salty, so season at the end.
- Individual glass-covered dishesSmall individual baking dishes closed with glass covers; the recipe specifies the covers as glass but says nothing about the dishes themselves. Ramekins with foil, or small cocottes with lids, do the same job. The cover matters: it keeps the cream from reducing to a skin in the eight minutes it is in the oven.
- Parmesan and cream on the toastTwo tablespoons of grated Parmesan moistened with two tablespoons of cream is a loose paste, not a sprinkle. Grate finely so it melts into the toast rather than sitting on it, and go easy on added salt given the cheese and the beef extract.
- Peeling mushroomsPeeling the caps was a routine instruction in cookbooks of this period. Cultivated white or cremini mushrooms need only a wipe. The hour-long Sherry soak in the Eugénie version does still do something worthwhile — the caps take up the wine and give back a teaspoon of it for the toast.
- LardingThreading strips of chilled pork fat through the meat with a larding needle. Few home kitchens keep one now; wrapping each piece in a thin sheet of fatback or unsmoked bacon before the pan achieves much the same protection against drying.
- YieldOne large sweetbread cut in eight makes eight canapé-sized portions, or four servings as a first course. The cutlet version, with creamed asparagus tips, serves two to three as a light main.
Sweetbreads occupied a particular place in the Boston Cooking-School repertoire: expensive, delicate, quick to spoil, and therefore a test of a cook's judgement rather than her strength. Fannie Farmer's book gives a long run of them — larded, braised, creamed, in cutlets, in croustades — because a young woman trained at the school might reasonably be asked to produce a fashionable entrée at short notice, and sweetbreads cooked in minutes once the tedious soaking and pressing was done. The dish names follow the restaurant convention of the day, borrowing a city or a personage without much regard for provenance; "Eugénie" almost certainly gestures at the Empress Eugénie, wife of Napoleon III, whose name was attached to a great many garnished dishes in the late nineteenth century. The individual baking dishes with their glass covers are a period detail of their own: serving each guest a sealed little dish to open at the table was part of the pleasure.