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Sweetbread Patties
Use a half can of button mushrooms to every pair of sweetbreads and moisten with white sauce, as previously directed.
This is shorthand written for a cook who has already read the surrounding pages: it assumes you know how to prepare sweetbreads, how to make white sauce, and what a patty shell is. Those three assumptions are the whole recipe.
- What a "pair" of sweetbreads isVeal sweetbreads are sold as a pair — the round heart sweetbread and the longer throat sweetbread — running roughly 1 to 1 1/4 lb together. Butchers rarely keep them in the case; order ahead.
- The step the recipe leaves outSweetbreads must be soaked in several changes of cold water until they lose their pink, then blanched, plunged into ice water, and peeled of membrane before they go anywhere near a sauce. Skipping this gives you a chewy, faintly bloody filling. Many cooks then press them under a weighted plate for an hour to firm the texture.
- Half a can of button mushroomsCanned mushroom sizes varied and the book does not say which size it means, so the quantity is a guess; something on the order of a few ounces drained, roughly a cup, is a reasonable working amount. Fresh mushrooms sauteed in butter until their water has cooked off will substitute, though the flavour is cleaner and less briny than the canned original.
- White sauce, as previously directedThe sauce meant is the book's own, given on an earlier page and not reproduced here; a period white sauce is butter and flour cooked together without colouring, then milk stirred in and simmered until it coats a spoon. For a filling you want it thick — about 2 tablespoons each of butter and flour to a cup of milk — or the patties leak.
- Patties means the shell, not the meatIn this period a patty is a small puff-paste case, close to what a French menu calls a bouchee (the vol-au-vent is the larger version of the same thing). Frozen puff pastry shells do the job; bake them empty, warm them through, and fill them at the last moment so the pastry stays crisp.
- Cut, don't minceDice the peeled sweetbreads into pieces about the size of the mushroom buttons and fold them into the hot sauce off the heat, just long enough to warm through. Prolonged simmering in the sauce turns them woolly.
- SeasoningNeither sweetbreads nor bechamel bring much salt of their own. Season the sauce assertively and add lemon juice, nutmeg, or a spoonful of sherry — all standard in the period — or the dish reads as bland.
- YieldOne pair of sweetbreads with sauce fills six to eight small patty shells, enough for four as a lunch course.
Sweetbreads — the thymus of a calf, sometimes the pancreas — were a luxury of the American table between about 1880 and the First World War, appearing at ladies' luncheons, wedding breakfasts and club suppers in exactly this form: creamed, bound with bechamel, and spooned into puff-paste cases. The Butterick Publishing Company, better known for dress patterns, issued its cook book to the same middle-class readership it sold sewing patterns to, and the recipe's telegraphic brevity is typical of the genre; instructions were cross-referenced rather than repeated to save paper. The canned mushrooms are the period detail worth noticing. Commercially canned button mushrooms were still something of a convenience novelty in domestic cooking, though French tinned mushrooms had been imported for some decades, and their appearance in a genteel recipe shows how quickly tinned goods were absorbed into cooking that still presented itself as refined. Offal of this kind largely left the American home kitchen after the mid-century, a shift often attributed less to any change in taste than to the decline of the local butcher trade that supplied it.