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Creamed Sweetbreads
Wash and boil the required number of sweetbreads for twenty minutes or so, then drain and chop them into small pieces; put them into a saucepan with some white sauce and boil for a few minutes. Toast some slices of bread, remove the crusts, butter the slices, cut them into halves or quarters and place them on a hot dish. Pour the creamed sweetbreads over the toast, and serve hot.
A Waldorf lunch dish written in the shorthand of a professional kitchen, where the white sauce was always standing ready and the butcher's terms needed no explaining. Two things the text leaves out matter more than anything it says: the soaking and the peeling.
- What a sweetbread isVeal sweetbreads are the thymus (the elongated "throat" sweetbread) and the pancreas (the rounder "heart" or "belly" sweetbread, generally the more prized). They are a special-order item from a butcher now, often sold by the pair; figure one pair for two people as a light main course, and more for a crowd.
- Soak firstOscar assumes it. Soak the sweetbreads in several changes of cold water, an hour or two in the refrigerator, until the water runs clear, or they will taste bloody and look grey.
- Twenty minutes is a blanch, not a boilBring them up in barely simmering salted water with a squeeze of lemon; a hard boil toughens them and breaks them up. Fifteen to twenty minutes for a full pair is right, then straight into cold water.
- Peel while warmThe outer membrane and any tubes or fat pull away easily as soon as the sweetbreads are cool enough to handle, and refuse to afterwards. Skipping this leaves chewy strands through the finished dish.
- The white sauceMeaning béchamel: 2 tablespoons butter and 2 tablespoons flour cooked together without colour, then about a cup of hot milk whisked in and simmered until it coats a spoon. It should be loose enough to flow over toast, not to sit on it.
- "Boil for a few minutes"Treat this as a gentle reheat of two or three minutes. The sweetbreads are already cooked, and prolonged boiling in the sauce makes them grainy while the sauce scorches on the pan bottom.
- Season it yourselfThe original names no seasoning at all, which was the cook's business. Salt, white pepper, a scrape of nutmeg, and, if you like, a spoonful of sherry or a little cream stirred in off the heat.
- ServingToast points want to go under the sauce at the last moment; they turn to paste if they sit. A hot platter, as specified, helps keep a cream sauce from skinning over.
Creamed sweetbreads on toast was one of the standard "light" dishes of American hotel and club cookery around 1900 — the sort of thing ordered at a late breakfast, a ladies' luncheon or a supper after the theatre, alongside creamed chicken and lobster Newburg. Sweetbreads were then a fashionable delicacy rather than an oddity: mild, pale, faintly sweet, and easily bought because veal calves were slaughtered in quantity for the city trade. Oscar Tschirky, the Waldorf's maître d'hôtel, published his Cook Book in 1896, a large general compendium that drew on standard printed sources as well as the world of the hotel dining room; entries like this one read as reminders to someone who already knows the method rather than as instructions to a beginner. The dish faded with the general retreat of offal from the American table after mid-century, and the eventual scarcity of veal sweetbreads at retail has done the rest.