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Curried Sweetbreads
Take two calf's sweetbreads and cut them into pieces about two inches square. Pour into a pan three-fourths of a pint of good vealstock, put it over the fire and then throw in an onion sliced and fried, one tablespoonful each of curry-powder and vinegar, salt to taste, and one ounce of butter with sufficient flour rubbed into it to thicken the gravy; stir until it boils, then put in the sweetbreads and let them simmer for half an hour longer.
A short Anglo-Indian braise that assumes the cook already knows how to prepare sweetbreads — which is the whole difficulty, since Oscar says nothing about it.
- Prepare the sweetbreads firstThe recipe skips the standard preliminary: soak them in several changes of cold water for two to three hours until they lose their pink blush, then blanch 3-5 minutes in acidulated water, cool, and peel off the outer membrane and any tubes. Cut raw, unsoaked sweetbreads and you get a gritty, bloody sauce.
- What a sweetbread isThe thymus (throat) or pancreas (heart/belly) of a young calf, usually sold in pairs. Two calf's sweetbreads will come to something in the region of 1 1/2 to 2 lb, enough for about four, though weights vary a good deal. You may need to order them from a butcher.
- Three-fourths of a pintRead as an American pint, the likelier measure for a book published in New York in 1896, that is 1 1/2 cups; an Imperial pint would give about 1 3/4 cups. Either works — start at 1 1/2 cups and add stock if the pan runs dry.
- Simmer, not boilSweetbreads firm up and turn dense with hard cooking. Once they go into the sauce, hold it at a bare tremble. Half an hour is on the long side for pieces already blanched; 15-20 minutes is enough for two-inch pieces, and they should stay yielding under a fork.
- The butter and flourThis is a beurre manié — 1 oz butter (2 tablespoons) kneaded with roughly the same volume of flour, whisked into the simmering stock in small pieces. It goes in before the sweetbreads so the sauce can come to a boil to cook out the raw flour.
- Curry powder has changedCommercial curry powders of the period are generally reckoned to have been milder and more turmeric-forward than many jars sold now, though blends varied by maker. Bloom it in the pan with the fried onion for a minute before the stock goes in; raw curry powder stirred into liquid tastes dusty.
- ServingThe recipe says nothing about serving, but curried dishes of this period were commonly sent out with a border of plain boiled rice. Chutney or a squeeze of lemon offsets the vinegar in the sauce.
Sweetbreads were a fixture of American hotel cooking at the turn of the century — expensive, delicate, and requiring skilled handling, which made them exactly the sort of thing a house like the Waldorf put on its menus. Oscar Tschirky, the maitre d'hotel whose name fronts this 1896 collection, drew heavily on the French repertoire, but curried dishes came into it by a different route: the Anglo-Indian kitchen of the British Empire, whose bottled curry powders and "curried" veal, chicken, lobster and rabbit had been standard in English and American cookbooks for decades by then. The vinegar here is more characteristic of that Anglo-Indian lineage than of Indian cooking as such, and the finish with a flour-and-butter thickening is straight out of the European sauce tradition. Offal of this kind has since retreated from mainstream American cooking, so the recipe is a reminder that the thymus of a calf once needed no more introduction to a reader than a chicken breast does now.