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Attereaux of Sweetbreads
Boil two large sweetbreads until they are done; let them cool and divide them into slices. Sprinkle over them a little salt and pepper, and arrange them round the bottom of a sautepan in which some butter has been spread. Fry over a sharp fire; take them out and place them on a slab to cool, with a light weight on top to make them flat. When these slices are quite cold, cut them round with a cutter, and put them into a basin with an equal quantity of similar rounds of boiled tongues and mushrooms, all cut with the same cutter so as to be exactly the same size as the rounds of sweetbreads. Pour over them in the basin a little well reduced brown sauce, roll them in this sauce, and then string them alternately on little wooden skewers. Have ready some villeroy sauce, made by beating some yolks of eggs up in a mortar with butter divided into little pieces; add this to the usual white sauce, reduced and made consistent, and boil up. Dip the attereaux in the sauce made at the same time as they are preparing, and arrange them on a baking sheet, at a little distance from each other to let the sauce cool. Then take them out, one by one, trim off the superfluous sauce, and roll them in breadcrumbs; dip into beaten egg, and again roll in breadcrumbs; then plunge them into boiling fat until of a good color. Drain, remove the wooden skewer, place them on ornamental metal attelettes, and dish on a folded napkin. No sauce is required in serving these.
An attereau is a skewered, sauce-coated, breaded and fried garnish from the classical French repertoire, and the whole thing hinges on chilling: the villeroy coating must set hard before the crumbs go on, or the skewers fall apart in the fat.
- Buy and prep the sweetbreadsOscar assumes you know the preliminaries. Veal sweetbreads should be soaked in several changes of cold water for a few hours, blanched from cold water to a bare simmer for about 5 minutes, refreshed, then peeled of membrane and pressed under a weight while cold. Two large ones is roughly 1 1/2 lb.
- "Boil until done"Poach at a bare simmer, 15-20 minutes for a large veal sweetbread. A hard boil makes them grainy and shrunken.
- "A sharp fire"High heat, a hot pan, a fast sear on both sides for color only. The sweetbreads are already cooked; this is a browning step.
- Villeroy sauceA thick béchamel or velouté enriched with egg yolks and butter, reduced until it will coat a spoon heavily and set solid when cold. Modern practice is to whisk the yolk-butter liaison in off the heat and bring it back only to a bare boil, or it will scramble. The mortar in the original is doing the work of a bowl and whisk.
- The set-up stageDip, lay on an oiled tray, and refrigerate until the coating is firm and rubbery, at least an hour. Oscar says only to "let the sauce cool" on a baking sheet, which in a warm kitchen would have meant a cold larder or ice box. Use the fridge.
- Boiled tonguePickled or salt-cured beef tongue, poached and peeled, is still sold at delis and butchers. Sliced smoked tongue or a firm cooked ham of similar thickness stands in without much loss.
- MushroomsCut rounds from thick slices of large cultivated caps, cooked briefly in butter first so they are not raw and wet inside the crust.
- Frying fat"Boiling fat" means deep fat at 350-375F. Below that the coating absorbs grease before it colors; above it, the crumbs darken before the interior warms through. Two to three minutes is enough.
- Skewers and attelettesWooden skewers are structural during assembly and frying; the ornamental metal attelettes Oscar slides in afterward are purely for the dining room. A single set of skewers left in place is entirely acceptable.
- YieldTwo large sweetbreads with equal tongue and mushroom will give roughly eight to ten skewers, enough for four as a first course.
Attereaux belong to the elaborate garnish vocabulary of nineteenth-century French cooking, codified by Carême and Urbain Dubois and carried into American hotel kitchens by chefs trained in that system. The name comes from the skewer itself, and the technique — coating something already cooked in a stiff sauce, chilling it solid, then breading and frying — is the same one behind croquettes and cromesquis. Sauce Villeroy is traditionally credited to the household of the Villeroy family, though as with most such attributions the connection is repeated more often than it is documented. Sweetbreads were a luxury item on Waldorf menus, and the labor here — poaching, pressing, searing, cutting to a uniform round with a cutter, twice-crumbing — is the point: it is a dish that advertises a brigade large enough to spend an afternoon on a garnish. Oscar Tschirky, who ran the Waldorf's dining rooms rather than its stoves, collected exactly this sort of formal French preparation for the 1896 book that carries his name.