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Sweetbread Salad
To make enough for six persons, use a pair of large sweetbreads; one-half pint of thinly-sliced celery; six heart leaves of lettuce; one-half pint of mayonnaise; one tablespoon of vinegar; one-half tablespoon of oil; one saltspoon of salt and onethird a saltspoon of pepper. Clean the sweetbreads, boil in water for twenty minutes, let them cool, and cut them in cubes. Add the vinegar, oil, salt and pepper, and place the dish in the refrigerator for one hour. Prepare the lettuce and celery, and put them also on ice to chill. Just before serving time mix the celery and sweetbreads, and add half the dressing. Arrange the lettuce leaves on a flat dish, divide the sweetbread mixture into six parts, and place one part on each leaf. Drop the remainder of the dressing, a teaspoon at a time, upon the salad and serve at once.
A straightforward composed salad whose success rests entirely on how the sweetbreads are handled before they ever meet the dressing. Everything else is assembly.
- The hinge: soak, then peelThe book says only "clean the sweetbreads," which assumed knowledge the reader had. Soak them in several changes of cold water for two to three hours until they lose their blush, then poach and, while still warm, pull away the outer membrane and any tubes or fat. Membrane left on tightens as it cools and makes the cubes chewy.
- What a pair of sweetbreads isA "pair" is generally taken to mean the two pieces from one animal, roughly 1 to 1 1/4 lb total for large ones, giving about 1 lb trimmed. Veal sweetbreads sold today are usually the thymus, though the rounder "heart" or "kernel" sweetbread is often the pancreas; the rounder piece is the prized one. Ask a butcher to order them, as they are rarely in a supermarket case.
- Poaching, not boilingTwenty minutes at a hard boil will toughen them. Bring water with a splash of vinegar and a little salt just to a bare simmer, hold the sweetbreads in it 15 to 20 minutes depending on size, then plunge into ice water. Pressing them flat under a plate and a weight while they chill makes for neater cubes.
- Saltspoon and half pintA saltspoon is 1/4 teaspoon, so this is 1/4 teaspoon salt and a scant 1/12 teaspoon of pepper — season by taste rather than by the letter. Half a pint of celery is 1 cup sliced; half a pint of mayonnaise is likewise 1 cup.
- The vinegar and oil stepThis is a marinade, not a dressing: three parts vinegar to one and a half of oil, which is far sharper than a vinaigrette and is meant to season bland meat from the inside. An hour is the minimum; two does no harm.
- MayonnaisePeriod mayonnaise was made with raw yolks and used the same day. If making it from scratch, use pasteurised eggs, and keep the finished salad refrigerated until the moment it goes to the table — cooked offal and egg dressing are both quick to spoil at room temperature.
- Lettuce"Heart leaves" means the pale inner cups of head lettuce; Bibb or the inner leaves of a romaine heart give the same cupped shape. They must be bone dry or the dressing slides off.
- YieldSix first-course servings as written, or four as a light lunch. It does not keep — dress and plate immediately before serving, as the recipe insists.
Sweetbreads occupied an odd rank in American cooking around 1900: an organ meat, but an expensive and genteel one, served at ladies' luncheons and hotel suppers. The name has nothing to do with bread or sugar; it is generally traced to older senses of "bread" meaning a morsel of flesh, with "sweet" distinguishing the mild thymus from stronger offal. It appears here in the salad chapter, and chilled composed salads on lettuce cups were then the fashionable way to serve almost any cold cooked protein — chicken, lobster, veal — with celery as the standard crunchy foil. The instruction to put both lettuce and celery "on ice" is a reminder of how recently the domestic refrigerator was still a wooden icebox, and how much of a dish's appeal rested on being genuinely cold.