Home › The Waldorf Kitchen › Lambs' Sweetbreads in Cases
Lambs' Sweetbreads in Cases
Blanch, pare and clean half a dozen lambs' sweetbreads. Lay them aside to cool, then lard them with either fresh fat pork or truffles. Place them in a well buttered stewpan, adding one gill of Madeira wine and one gill of chicken broth. Cover with a buttered paper, and let them cook to a golden color in the oven for ten minutes, then place them on a dish. Put one-half gill of cooked fine herbs, and one gill of reduced Spanish sauce into the pan, allowing it to cook for five minutes. Take six small buttered paper cases, pour a little of gravy at the bottom of each, fill in with sweetbreads, and place them on a bakingdish; keep them in an open oven for five minutes, then serve on a folded napkin.
A short Escoffier-era braise that assumes a professional larder: a stock sauce already made, fines herbes already cooked, and paper cases already cut. The work is mostly in the sweetbreads themselves, which the recipe dispatches in four words.
- The hinge: soak and press before you blanch"Blanch, pare and clean" compresses a half-day job. Soak the sweetbreads in several changes of cold water until they run pale, blanch 3-5 minutes in barely simmering salted water, refresh in ice water, then peel away membrane and gristle. Press them between two plates with a weight for at least an hour in the refrigerator so they hold shape and slice cleanly; without pressing they poach into a shapeless curd.
- Lambs' sweetbreadsThe glands of the lamb (thymus, or sometimes pancreas), considerably smaller than veal — six of them serve six only as a light course. Veal sweetbreads are the easier ones to find today; if you substitute, roughly one large veal sweetbread, trimmed and cut into six portions, will stand in, and it will need longer in the pan.
- A gillHalf a cup, 4 fl oz. So a half cup Madeira, a half cup chicken broth, a quarter cup of the herb mixture and a half cup of sauce.
- LardingThreading strips of fat pork (or truffle) through the meat with a larding needle. Fresh fat back or unsmoked fatback is the correct pork; bacon brings smoke the dish does not want. Barding — wrapping in a thin sheet of fat and tying — is the practical modern substitute.
- Oven heatNo temperature is given. The ten-minute stage wants a fairly hot oven — enough to colour the sweetbreads under the buttered paper, which is a cartouche laid directly on them, not a lid. "Open oven" is ambiguous in period usage; read here as a gentle finish, warm enough to set the cases and heat through rather than to cook further.
- Spanish sauceSauce espagnole: brown stock thickened with a dark roux and enriched with mirepoix and tomato, then reduced. "Reduced Spanish sauce" here is demi-glace in all but name. A well-reduced brown veal or chicken stock, mounted with a little butter, stands in acceptably.
- Cooked fine herbsFines herbes — parsley, chervil, tarragon, chives — chopped fine and sweated in butter, sometimes with shallot and mushroom, before going into the pan. Adding them raw at this stage gives a grassier, sharper result than intended.
- Paper casesCaisses: stiff pleated parchment or paper containers, buttered so they don't scorch or absorb the sauce. Small ramekins or foil-lined baking cups work; the "folded napkin" underneath is service, not cooking, and keeps the cases from sliding on the platter.
- YieldSix cases, one per person, as an entrée course in the old sense — a small hot dish between fish and roast, not a main plate.
Oscar Tschirky ran the dining rooms of the Waldorf from 1893 and his 1896 cook book records what a large American hotel kitchen of that moment actually cooked, which was French. Sweetbreads in cases belongs to the standard entrée repertoire of the period: an expensive, delicate offal, larded with truffle or pork fat, braised briefly in Madeira, sauced with espagnole, and served in individual paper caisses so that each guest received a self-contained portion. Sweetbreads carried real prestige on nineteenth-century menus — they were scarce, perishable, and demanded a cook who knew how to soak, blanch and press them — and they recur elsewhere in this book in vol-au-vents, patties and garnishes. The paper case was as much presentation as cookery: it kept a small portion hot and made it look like more than it was.