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Sweetbread and Oyster Pie
1 pair sweetbreads
1 cup cream or milk
2 dozen oysters
2 egg-yolks, hard cooked
1 tablespoon butter
Pepper and salt
1 tablespoon flour
Puff or plain pie-paste
Prepare sweetbreads. Make a white sauce with fat, flour, cream or milk, and add the egg-yolks, chopped very fine. Add sweetbreads and prepared oysters to the sauce. Season, put in a deep baking-dish, cover with a layer of paste, and bake.
Stuffe
A late-Victorian company dish that assumes two things the recipe never explains: how to prepare sweetbreads, and how briefly oysters want cooking. Get both right and the rest is a simple pot pie.
- "Prepare sweetbreads"The book expects you to know the drill: soak them in several changes of cold water for a few hours to draw out blood, simmer gently in acidulated water about 15 minutes until firm, then plunge into ice water and peel away the membrane and any tubes. Press between two plates under a weight until cold, then slice or break into bite-size pieces.
- "Prepared oysters"Shucked, picked over for shell fragments, and drained. Some cooks plumped them briefly in their own liquor until the edges curled; if you do, save the liquor and use part of it in the sauce for flavour.
- Oyster timingThe oysters go in raw or barely plumped and finish in the oven under the crust. Anything more and they shrink to erasers. This is the hinge of the dish: the baking time is set by the pastry, not the filling, and both sweetbreads and oysters are already cooked or nearly so.
- The sauce is deliberately thinOne tablespoon each of butter and flour to a cup of cream gives a pouring sauce, not a paste. The oysters will shed liquor in the oven and loosen it further, so if you want it firmer, go to 1½ tablespoons of each, no more.
- "Fat"Simply the tablespoon of butter listed above; the word was often used loosely in period recipes to cover butter, drippings or rendered pork fat.
- Hard-cooked yolksTwo yolks chopped very fine enrich the sauce and give it body; egg-yolk liaisons are an older device than the flour-and-butter roux that largely replaced them. Push them through a sieve rather than chopping for a smoother result.
- OvenNo temperature is given; the book leaves it to the cook's judgement. Bake at about 425F until the crust is well risen and browned, roughly 25 to 30 minutes for puff paste, a little longer for plain. Cut two or three vents so steam escapes and the filling does not boil up under the lid.
- YieldA pair of sweetbreads and two dozen oysters fills a 1½-quart baking dish and serves four to six as a main course, more as one course of a longer meal.
- The truncated wordThe page ends mid-word with "Stuffe", which appears to belong to the following recipe rather than to this one.
Sweetbreads — the thymus and pancreas of a calf or lamb — were a luxury on American tables well into the twentieth century, and pairing them with oysters was standard practice in the chafing-dish and entrée cookery of the period, the mild richness of one set against the brine of the other. That both are here treated as everyday pantry items says a great deal about the era: oysters were still cheap and abundant along the Atlantic seaboard, shipped inland by rail in barrels and cans, while offal of all kinds carried none of the squeamishness it acquired later. Its treatment as an entrée is telling too; in the older service an entrée was a made dish served between heavier courses, and a reader would have understood this pie as something to set before guests rather than as supper. The hard-cooked egg yolk worked into the sauce is a survival of a much older thickening method, common in eighteenth-century English cookery and gradually displaced by flour-and-butter roux.