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Sweetbread Patties
Follow directions for the filling of chicken patties, substituting prepared sweetbreads for chicken.
A one-line variation that assumes you already know two things the book only explains elsewhere: how to make a creamed patty filling, and what "prepared" sweetbreads means. The second is where the work is.
- Preparing the sweetbreads"Prepared" is shorthand for soak, blanch, trim, press. Soak in several changes of cold water for two to three hours until they lose their pink, simmer 15-20 minutes in acidulated salted water, plunge into ice water, then peel away the membrane and gristle. Press between two plates with a weight for an hour so they slice cleanly.
- Which sweetbreadThroat sweetbreads (thymus) and stomach or belly sweetbreads (pancreas) are both sold; the rounder, firmer lobe is the easier one to dice into neat pieces for a filling. They are often sold frozen and may need to be ordered ahead.
- The fillingThe chicken patty filling is not reproduced here; the standard period version is a thick white sauce -- on the order of 2 tablespoons butter, 2 tablespoons flour and 1 cup milk or cream and stock -- folded around diced cooked meat. It should mound on a spoon, not run; a slack filling will soak the pastry.
- Season more than you thinkSweetbreads are milder than chicken and take salt, white pepper, a scrape of nutmeg and a little lemon juice or sherry. Without acid the dish reads as flat and rich at once.
- Patty shellsThe period patty case is a puff-paste shell of the vol-au-vent type. Frozen puff pastry shells are the direct modern equivalent; bake them empty according to the package directions, fill just before serving, and do not fill and hold or the base turns to paste.
- ReheatingThe sweetbreads are already cooked through by the blanching. They only need warming in the sauce for two or three minutes — held longer over heat they tighten and turn granular.
- YieldA pound of sweetbreads, once trimmed, should fill roughly six to eight standard patty shells -- about four servings as a lunch or first course.
Sweetbreads were a genuine luxury in American cooking around 1900 — expensive, delicate, and a fixture of hotel and club menus — which is why a book aimed at ordinary households files them among the entrées, alongside the thrifty uses of yesterday's roast. The patty case itself descends from the French vol-au-vent, and creamed fillings in pastry shells were the workhorse of the era's luncheon and supper table, endlessly adaptable to chicken, oysters, lobster or sweetbreads. The cross-reference is terse: establish one master preparation, then list its variations in a line apiece. The name has nothing to do with sweetness or bread, though the origin of the word is genuinely uncertain. Demand has fallen far enough since that sweetbreads are now more often a restaurant dish than a home one — the reverse of the situation this book assumed.