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Sweetbreads in Pepper Cases
1 cup cooked sweetbreads
½ cup brown or white stock
6 peppers
(preferably chicken)
2 tablespoons butter
2 tablespoons cream
2 tablespoons flour
½ cup button mushrooms
Crums
Worcestershire sauce
Salt, pepper and paprika
Prepare the sweetbreads. Melt fat, add flour, salt and pepper. Mix smooth, add stock and cream. Cook until thick. Stir in the sweetbreads and mushrooms cut into small pieces and the seasoning. Fill prepared peppers, cover with buttered crums and bake. Mushroom sauce may be poured around the peppers.
A stuffed-pepper entrée from the era when sweetbreads were standard restaurant fare rather than a specialty order. The list is set in two columns and has scrambled slightly in transcription, so read it carefully before shopping.
- The garbled lineThe list is set in two columns and has scrambled, and "(preferably chicken)" most likely belongs with the stock line above rather than with the peppers, though the original layout cannot be recovered with certainty. Either way, six peppers is what you need.
- "Prepare the sweetbreads"This is the hinge and the book assumes you know it. Soak veal sweetbreads in several changes of cold water for an hour or two until pale, simmer 15-20 minutes in acidulated water, plunge into ice water, then peel away the membrane and connective tissue and press between two plates under a weight until firm. Unpressed sweetbreads fall apart in the sauce.
- Buying themAsk for veal sweetbreads. The pair comprises the thymus (the ragged "throat" or "neck" sweetbread, usually cheaper) and the pancreas (the round "heart" or "kernel" sweetbread, generally reckoned the prize). Roughly a pound of raw sweetbreads should give about the cup of cooked meat called for. They are highly perishable — use within a day of purchase and keep them cold at every stage.
- Preparing the peppersCut off the tops, seed them, and parboil 3-5 minutes in salted water, then drain upside down. Raw peppers will not soften in the time the filling needs to heat through.
- CrumsPeriod spelling for breadcrumbs. Toss fresh crumbs with melted butter, roughly 2 tablespoons butter to a cup of crumbs.
- The sauceTwo tablespoons each of butter and flour to the recipe's scant ¾ cup of liquid (½ cup stock plus 2 tablespoons cream) gives a thick binding sauce, which is what you want — it must hold the filling, not pool. Season it assertively; Worcestershire and paprika are doing most of the work.
- Oven and timeNo temperature is given; few home ranges of the period had a reliable oven thermometer. Around 375F for 20-25 minutes should brown the crumbs and heat the filling through. Stand the peppers in a dish that holds them upright.
- YieldSix peppers, one apiece, as a light entrée or luncheon dish.
Sweetbreads occupied an odd place in American cooking: enough of a delicacy to appear on hotel menus in patty shells and creamed with mushrooms, yet treated in household books as an everyday made-over dish. This recipe belongs squarely to the "entrées and made-over dishes" tradition, in which yesterday's cooked meat is bound in a white or brown sauce, given a case — a pepper, a tomato, a ramekin, a pastry shell — and sent to table looking new. The pepper case itself is often said to have been a fashionable turn-of-the-century device for serving a small quantity of meat handsomely. Sweetbreads fell out of general American use after mid-century, partly through changing tastes in offal and partly because they demand the soaking, blanching and pressing that this book could still assume every cook knew.