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Veal Sweetbread and Oyster Pie
Boil the sweetbread until tender, season it with butter, pepper and salt and then add two dozen oysters, thickening their juice with one cup of cream, one tablespoon of butter, the yolks of two hard boiled eggs and one tablespoon of flour. Pour all into a deep pan, lay on a cover of paste and bake. If there is too much liquid set it aside and serve with the pie, should the latter prove too dry when baked.
A late-Victorian creamed pie that assumes you know how to handle a sweetbread and how to line a dish with paste. Both assumptions need filling in, and the oysters need protecting from the oven.
- Oysters go in barely cookedShucked oysters need about two minutes of heat before they tighten and turn rubbery. Fold them into the sauce off the heat so that their only real cooking is the time under the crust, and keep that as short as the pastry allows.
- Preparing the sweetbreadThe recipe skips the standard preliminaries. Soak the sweetbread in several changes of cold water for a few hours to draw the blood, blanch it briefly, then cool it and peel away the outer membrane and any tubes before the final poaching. Veal sweetbread is the thymus of a calf, sold by good butchers on order rather than off the shelf; a pair weighs roughly a pound.
- "Tender" means about 15-20 minutesA blanched, trimmed sweetbread poaches through in a quarter of an hour in barely simmering salted water or stock. It should be firm and sliceable, not falling apart. Cool it before cutting into thick slices or bite-sized pieces.
- Thickening their juiceStrain the oyster liquor of grit, work the flour into the tablespoon of butter as a paste, and whisk it into the simmering liquor and cream. The hard-boiled yolks are rubbed through a sieve and stirred in at the end; they enrich and thicken rather than bind, and lumps will not dissolve.
- "Paste" and "cover"A plain short or puff paste, laid over the filling only. This is a single-crust pie in a deep dish, not a lined one; cut a vent so steam escapes rather than lifting the lid.
- OvenNo temperature is given. Bake hot enough to set the pastry quickly, 425F, for about 25-30 minutes, until the crust is browned and the filling bubbles at the vent. Longer baking buys nothing and costs the oysters.
- SeasoningOyster liquor is salty and the sweetbread is bland. Salt the sauce after the liquor goes in, and add a scrape of nutmeg or a little lemon if the cream tastes flat.
- YieldTwo dozen oysters and the sweetbread (the recipe specifies one, not a pair) fill roughly a 1.5-quart dish and serve four to six as a main course.
Sweetbreads and oysters were both everyday luxuries in American cooking around 1900 rather than the rarities they are now: oysters came into eastern cities by the barrel and were cheap enough for pies, stews and stuffings, while offal of all kinds was standard butcher's stock. Pairing the two was a familiar move, the mild, faintly sweet texture of the thymus set against the brine of the oyster and bound with cream. The Butterick Publishing Company, better known for dress patterns and The Delineator, also issued cookery and household titles alongside its other manuals, aimed largely at the middle-class woman running a house with little or no help; that readership may account for the compression here, since the recipe assumes someone who already knows to soak and skin a sweetbread and to make paste, and spends its words instead on the sauce and on the practical warning about too much liquid. The instruction to hold back surplus sauce and serve it separately is a small piece of period good sense, since a covered pie gives no way to judge the filling once the crust is on.