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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CREAMED SWEETBREADS (Parboil and cut two pairs)
Parboil and cut two pairs of sweet breads into dice. Cook together in a saucepan two tablespoons, each, of butter and flour, and pour upon them a pint of cream. to a smooth sauce, add the sweetbreads and cook, stirring steadily antil very hot. Season with salt, pepper, and a teaspoon of minced parsley. 25 LARDED SWEETBREADS (Roasted) - Prepare sweetbreads as usual. Lard them with salt pork letting the ends of the strips curl over the edge of the sweetbreads. Lay in a roasting pan, pour over them one pint of seasoned stock. Cover and cook for one hour. Serve on toast. Thicken the gravy in the pan and pour around them.
MOCK TURTLE À LA MARION HARLAND-Boil and blanch a calf's head, take out the bones and let the meat and tongue get cold in the liquor. Do not let it remain long enough to jelly. As soon as the meat is firm take it from the stock, wipe dry, and cut with the tongue into neat dice an inch long, and half as wide. Make a gravy of a large cup of the pot liquor, thickened with butter rolled in browned flour and seasoned with lemon and onion juice, a teaspoon of caramel, a little salt and paprika. Put in the meat, and simmer fifteen minutes.
Have ready a sauce made by heating a cup of cream (adding a pinch of soda) and pour it, stirring all the time, upon the beaten yolks of three eggs. Stir and beat for one minute, and add to the meat and gravy. Now add a glass of sherry and pour all into a deep dish, in which you have laid a pile of turtle eggs made by rubbing together the yolks of three hard boiled eggs and the boiled brains of the calf, binding them with a raw egg and a little browned flour. They should be made into little marbles with floured hands and cooked in boiling butter for two minutes, then fished out and drained in a colander.
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Three recipes run together here, and they need to be treated separately: the two sweetbread dishes are workable with modern handling, while the Marion Harland mock turtle depends on calf's brains and should be left on the page as reading matter only.
- Why the caution standsThe mock turtle's "turtle eggs" are made from boiled calf's brains bound with egg. Bovine central nervous tissue is the specified risk material for BSE transmission, and no domestic cooking step inactivates the prion. Bovine brain is barred from the human food chain in the EU and UK above the specified age threshold and similarly restricted in the US; the dish should be left on the page as reading matter rather than reproduced.
- Sweetbreads are not brainsSweetbreads are the thymus (throat) and pancreas (heart or belly) glands, sold as offal and not covered by the nervous-tissue restrictions. Veal sweetbreads are most likely what is meant in a book of this date; lamb sweetbreads are smaller.
- "Parboil as usual""Prepare sweetbreads as usual" -- The book assumes you know the standard preparation, which it omits: soak in cold water until the water runs clear, then simmer briefly in acidulated water, cool in ice water, and peel away the membrane and any tubes. Only then are they firm enough to dice or lard.
- Two pairs, and how much it feedsTwo pairs of veal sweetbreads is roughly 1 1/2 to 2 lb before trimming, which with a pint of cream sauce will serve about six over toast or in pastry shells. A pint is 2 cups; the butter-and-flour roux at 2 tablespoons each is thin for that volume, so expect a pouring sauce rather than a thick one.
- Transcription gapsA word is missing before "to a smooth sauce" (something like "stir" or "cook"), "antil" is until, and the stray "25" is most likely a recipe number from the printed page. Nothing is lost from the method.
- Larding with salt porkCut it into thin strips, thread them through the sweetbreads with a larding needle or the point of a boning knife, and hold back on additional salt in the stock.
- An hour is too longAn hour is long -- The roasted version calls for a covered hour in a pint of stock. Trimmed, parboiled sweetbreads are already largely cooked; a much shorter time is enough for them to take on the pork fat and colour. The book gives no oven temperature.
- Thickening the pan gravyNo proportion is given. About a tablespoon each of butter and flour per cup of reduced pan liquid gives a sauce that will coat the toast without soaking it.
Sweetbreads were a genuine delicacy in American cooking of this period, often said to be prized above ordinary cuts, and appearing on hotel menus creamed, larded, broiled or in patties; the Butterick book, aimed at the ambitious middle-class household, treats them as the sort of thing a competent cook should be able to turn out for company. The mock turtle beside them belongs to an older tradition still: real turtle soup was a luxury of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, and a boiled calf's head, with its gelatinous skin and mixed textures, was the standard imitation, the caramel and sherry supplying the colour and depth that turtle was prized for. The attribution is to Marion Harland, pen name of Mary Virginia Terhune, one of the most widely read American domestic writers of the later nineteenth century, whose recipes were reprinted freely in later compilations. Her fussy little brain-and-egg-yolk "turtle eggs" are a period conceit, meant to mimic the eggs found in a gravid turtle, and they are also the reason the dish is now unmakeable.