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Aiguillettes of Sweetbreads
Boil a sufficient number of throat sweetbreads in water for ten minutes. Pour off the water and add some onion, carrot and turnip, all sliced, bay leaves, and enough stock or broth. Let all simmer for twenty minutes, until the sweetbreads are quite firm; then take out and lay on a clean cloth. Cut them into pieces about the size of a quarter, with a long, round cutter, and season with pepper and salt. Then chop some shallots very fine, and fry them in a stewpan with a little butter until they are quite white; add some white sauce and a little white stock. Reduce it slowly until thickish, when the yolks of some eggs may be beaten in and the juice of some lemon. Do not let it boil after the yolks are added, but remove to one side of the stove. Dip the pieces of sweetbread into the sauce, and lay them on a dish until they are cold. Run the skewers through the centers of the pieces, two on a skewer. Put plenty of egg and breadcrumb on them and fry in hot lard, serving very hot on a folded napkin or dish-paper.
A classical French attereau in all but name: sweetbreads poached, bound in a thick egg-yolk sauce, chilled solid, then skewered, crumbed and deep-fried. The whole dish turns on the chilling step, and almost everything else can be done a day ahead.
- Chill the coated pieces properlyThe sauce is the glue and the insulation. If the dipped rounds are merely cool rather than cold and firm, the coating slumps off in the fryer. Spread them on a tray and refrigerate at least two hours, or overnight; crumb them straight from the cold.
- Throat sweetbreadsThe thymus gland of a calf, long and irregular, as opposed to the rounder "heart" sweetbread, which is the pancreas. Butchers now usually sell only the heart sweetbread and rarely label either; order ahead and use within a day or two, as they are highly perishable.
- Soak and press firstThe recipe skips a step most modern treatments include: soak the sweetbreads in several changes of cold water for a few hours to draw out blood, then peel away the outer membrane and heavy connective tissue after the first blanching. Pressing the poached lobes under a weighted plate makes them far easier to cut cleanly.
- "Quite firm" and twenty minutesTen minutes' blanching plus twenty in the aromatic broth is generous for gland meat that is going on to be deep-fried. Poach only until the lobes feel resilient and are opaque through, roughly 15 minutes at a bare simmer for average-sized pieces; overcooked sweetbreads turn grainy.
- "The size of a quarter"About one inch across. A plain round cutter gives neat disks a little under half an inch thick; save the trimmings for a croquette or a salpicon rather than wasting them.
- The sauce and its yolks"White sauce" here is most likely a veloute made on veal or chicken stock rather than a milk bechamel, given the white stock added to it. Once the yolks and lemon go in, hold the pan below about 180F and stir; boiling will curdle the liaison and it will not re-emulsify. Reduce it until it coats a spoon heavily, since a thin sauce will not set on the meat.
- Shallots "quite white"Sweat them in butter over low heat until soft and translucent with no colour at all. Any browning shows as flecks in a sauce meant to stay pale.
- Skewers and fryingThe skewers were probably the small ornamental attelets of period service; short metal or bamboo skewers do the same job. Fry at 350-360F, in neutral oil if lard is inconvenient, for two to three minutes until the crumb is deep gold; the interior is already cooked and only needs heating through.
- Yield and serviceThe recipe gives no quantities, calling only for "a sufficient number" of sweetbreads; count on two rounds per skewer and scale to the number of guests. The folded napkin is period plating, partly to catch frying fat; a wire rack and a warm plate do it better. Serve with lemon and a little of the reserved sauce, loosened with stock.
Oscar Tschirky, who ran the Waldorf dining rooms and put his name to this 1896 collection, was cooking at the high-water mark of American sweetbread eating. Calf's thymus was a fixture of hotel and club menus from the 1870s through the 1920s, prized because it was mild, pale, expensive and demanded skilled handling, exactly the qualities a luxury restaurant wanted to advertise. The technique here is Escoffier-era French: attereaux, in which cooked morsels are masked in a stiff reduced sauce, chilled until the coating sets, then skewered, breaded and fried, a method also used for brains, cockscombs and mushrooms. The title is a little loose, since aiguillette properly means a thin strip cut lengthwise, while these are stamped-out rounds; nineteenth-century American menu French was often more decorative than exact. The folded napkin under the skewers is pure period service, a signal of the same hotel formality that gave the book its audience.