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Sweetbread Croquettes
2 Sweetbreads 1/4 Pint Cream 1 Teaspoon Butter 1 Teaspoon Salt 1/2 Teaspoon Pepper 1/4 Teaspoon Onion Juice 1 Tablespoon Barley Flour 1 Egg 1 Dozen Mushrooms (dried and chopped) 1 Teaspoon Parsley (fine) Wash and parboil the sweetbreads, then put in cold water. Remove outside skin and all membrane; then with silver knife chop in small pieces and measure; there should be ½ pint.
Put the cream in a saucepan, rub the butter and flour together; stir with cream until it is a smooth paste; add the yolk of the egg and the sweetbread.
Mix and cook one minute. Take from the fire, add the mushrooms, chopped fine; add the salt, pepper, parsley and onion juice, well mixed. When cool form into croquettes; roll into beaten eggs and bread crumbs and fry in hot lard.
A standard turn-of-the-century croquette: a very soft bound mixture that depends entirely on being cold before it is shaped. Most of the work is in the sweetbreads themselves.
- Chill before shapingOne tablespoon of flour to half a cup of cream and half a pint of chopped sweetbread is a slack binding. "When cool" means thoroughly cold — spread the mixture in a shallow pan and refrigerate at least three hours, or overnight, or the croquettes will split and leak in the fat.
- Buying sweetbreadsSweetbreads are the thymus (and sometimes the pancreas) of a calf or lamb. Sizes vary a good deal, so buy generously: what matters is trimming down to the half pint of chopped meat the recipe measures out. Order them from a butcher, and soak them in several changes of cold water for an hour or two before parboiling to draw out blood.
- Parboil, then shockSimmer 15–20 minutes in salted, acidulated water, then straight into cold water as directed. The cold plunge firms them so the skin and the connective membrane strip away cleanly; warm sweetbreads tear.
- The silver knifeA period precaution against carbon-steel blades, which discolored pale meats and fruit. Stainless steel is fine, and the point is only that the pieces be cut rather than mashed.
- Measures1/4 pint of cream is 1/2 cup; the half pint of chopped sweetbread is 1 cup by volume. Use heavy cream — the sauce has almost no flour to hold it.
- Barley flourStill sold, usually in health-food aisles. It behaves somewhat differently from wheat as a thickener, so plain all-purpose flour in the same quantity is the safer bet if you want the mixture to hold.
- Dried mushrooms"1 dozen dried" is hard to convert to a weight; read it as a small handful. Soak in hot water 20 minutes, squeeze dry, then chop — added dry they stay gritty and leach liquid into the mixture.
- Onion juiceGrate a peeled onion on the fine side of a box grater and use the liquid that collects. It flavors without adding raw texture to a smooth filling.
- FryingLard or a neutral oil at 375F, deep enough to float the croquettes, three or four at a time; they need only 2–3 minutes to color, since the filling is already cooked. The whole egg for breading is separate from the yolk in the mixture — the leftover white plus one more egg is enough.
- YieldRoughly eight small croquettes, enough for four as a luncheon course with peas or a green salad.
Sweetbread croquettes were a fixture of the American ladies' luncheon and the small dinner party from the 1880s through the 1910s: they were the sort of dish that signaled a competent hostess, made from an expensive but small cut that could be stretched with cream sauce and crumbs. The name "sweetbread" for the thymus gland is old and its origin is disputed, one suggestion tracing it to Old English bræd, meaning flesh, with "sweet" distinguishing it from the stronger-tasting offal. Croquettes themselves came into English-language cookbooks from French practice, and American household manuals carried them in variety: chicken, veal, rice, lobster, all built on the same three-stage breading.